Nanotechnology

Norio Taniguchi was a professor of Tokyo University of Science. He coined the term nanotechnology in 1974, to describe semiconductor processes such as thin film deposition and ion beam milling exhibiting characteristic control on the order of a nanometer.

Silver Nano (Silver Nano Health System) is a trademark name of an antibacterial technology which uses silver nanoparticles in washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners, air purifiers and vacuum cleaners introduced by Samsung in April 2003.

The sol-gel process is a wet-chemical technique commonly used to synthesise a wide variety of nanomaterials. The sol-gel process is a wet-chemical technique widely used in the fields of materials science and ceramic engineering. Such methods are used primarily for the fabrication of materials (typically metal oxides) starting from a colloidal solution (sol) that acts as the precursor for an integrated network (or gel) of either discrete particles or network polymers.

The invention of the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981, provided unprecedented visualization of individual atoms and bonds, and was successfully used to manipulate individual atoms in 1989. The microscope's developers Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986.

Semiconductor nanocrystals in the sub-10 nm size range are often referred to as quantum dots. A quantum dot is a portion of matter (e.g., semiconductor) whose excitons are confined in all three spatial dimensions. Consequently, such materials have electronic properties intermediate between those of bulk semiconductors and those of discrete molecules.

Nanoparticles exhibit a number of special properties relative to bulk material. For example, the bending of bulk copper (wire, ribbon, etc.) occurs with movement of copper atoms/clusters at about the 50 nm scale. Copper nanoparticles smaller than 50 nm are considered super hard materials that do not exhibit the same malleability and ductility as bulk copper.

Nanotechnology includes particles which are 1 nm to 100 nm in size.

The nanostructure of lipids and proteins of mayonnaise contribute to its taste. They are combined into an emulsion as little droplets that are only a few hundred nanometers in size. So mayonnaise does not taste like eggs, oil or water. It is the interaction of the droplets' nanostructure, achieved through whipping and heating, that contributes to the taste and texture.

Nanomaterials, even when made of inert elements like gold, become highly active at nanometer dimensions. The colour of quantum dots is dependent only on their size and not on their chemistry.

Buckminsterfullerene (or buckyball) is a spherical fullerene molecule with the formula C60. It has a cage-like fused-ring structure (Truncated icosahedron) which resembles a soccer ball, made of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons, with a carbon atom at each vertex of each polygon and a bond along each polygon edge. It is a nanomaterial with important applications in the field of nanotechnology.

There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom is a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman considered the possibility of direct manipulation of individual atoms as a more powerful form of synthetic chemistry than those used at the time. The talk is considered to be a seminal event in the history of nanotechnology, as it inspired the conceptual beginnings of the field decades later.

Nanoscale is usually smaller than one tenth of a micrometre in at least one dimension, though this term is sometimes used for even smaller materials.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are allotropes of carbon with a cylindrical nanostructure. In particular, owing to their extraordinary thermal conductivity and mechanical and electrical properties, carbon nanotubes find applications as additives to various structural materials. 

Plasmonics is a field of nanophotonics that holds the promise of molecular-size optical device technology. One of the sizzling hot topics within nanophotonics is plasmonics, which holds the promise of a class of subwavelength-scale optoelectronic components that could form the building blocks of a chip-based optical device technology that is scaleable to molecular dimensions.

Nanomedicine ranges from medical applications of nanomaterials to nanoelectronic biosensors and even possible future applications of molecular nanotechnology. A benefit of using nanoscale for medical technologies is that smaller devices are less invasive and can possibly be implanted inside the body.