NANO TECHNOLOGY

This article will be published in series. Otherwise it will be very boring for you readers to read it.

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"Nano" is something which we hear very often these days; no matter it is used academically or not. The word "nano" would always remind the physicsts of the fields of nanosciecne and nanotechnology. Now what is nanotechnology? Lets have a look at it.

"Nano" means of the order of 10^(-9).
1nm= 10^(-9)m
Thus nano technology is the technology of particles having sizes in the nanometer regime. Nanotechnology is a wonderful innovation of the 20th century, but it is hailed as the 21st century technology. It was Sir Richard Feynman who laid the foundation to the wild idea of nanotechnology. His article "There's plenty of room at the bottom" describes how all the volumes of encyclopedia Britannica can be stored at he tip of a pin!

Though nanotechnology has been in use for centuries now, not many people are aware of it. Eg) Gold nanoparticles were used to colour cups and such things in ancient periods.
Nanotechnology is basically a branch of material science. In the nano regime, many material properties are different from those of the bulk material.
For example, we all know that aluminium is a good conductor of electricity. It conducts electricity with the help of free electrons present in it.This is bulk's property. When aluminium is cut into small pieces of nanometer size, it becomes a dielectric (ie a substance which transmits electric effects without conducting). Thus, size reduction changes the material's properties.

Some early findings in the direction of nanoscience are the following:
(1) Existence of nano ohase as primordial materials condensed from solar nebule and meteeorites.
(2) Occurance of mineral species as small crystallite.
(3) In 1861 Ostwald laid the foundation of colloidal science. he said that colloidal particles neglected dimensions.Around 1900, Einstein and John Tyndall characterised colloids.
(4) In 1962, Kubo discovered that physical properties of small metal particles will be quite different from those of bulk materials.

All these led to investigations on nanoparticles.

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Thats all for today. :)

About Scientist-PHY

Hi friends,
The fever of blogging has been on me for the past two weeks. I already have two blogs, one in English and the other in Malayalam, and they are soley dedicated to heart! So I thought why not start a blog solely dedicated to brain? Here it is. This is intended to be a Physics blog, but other topics may also find their way into the pages, here. :) I wish to write in my own words, things known to me and share the knowledge I've with everyone who reads this. The things which I write won't be my findings or so, I will just act like an allocator of knowledge. If there are any mistakes, readers are welcome to correct them. So here I come. :)