Nanotechnology Primer: How Does It Work?

(March 24) -- In order to understand how nanotechnology works, it's helpful to break the word itself down into its constituent parts.

The "nano" describes the size of the engineered particles at the heart of the field. It's derived from nanometer -- one billionth of a meter.

How small is that? "If a centimeter is represented by a football field, a nanometer would be the width of a human hair lying on the field," offers the oft-quoted William Hofmeister of the University of Tennessee Space Institute's Center for Laser Applications.

He gives another example: "If the distance to the moon was equal to one meter, a nanometer would be one foot."

Manipulating something so mind-bogglingly small is where the "technology" comes in.

Nobel Prize-winning Caltech physicist Richard Feynman introduced the intellectual underpinning for the field in 1959, and Japanese professor Norio Taniguchi coined the term "nanotechnology" in 1974. But theory could not become widespread reality until the invention of super-high-powered microscopes in the 1980s, which enabled scientists to see the atoms with which they were working. See: 16 Key Moments in Nanotechnology's Evolution

The specific way those atoms are arranged determines the properties of the resulting nanomaterial, explains Ralph Merkle, professor of nanotechnology at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. The transformations can be dramatic.

"If we rearrange the atoms in sand, we can make computer chips," he says. "If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air, we can make potatoes."

Nanoparticles can be designed into structures of a specific size, shape, chemical composition and surface design to create whatever is needed to do the job at hand. They can be suspended in liquid, ground into a powder, embedded into a composite or even added to a gas.

Along with the carbon nanotubes used in many industrial applications, there are quantum dots, which provided significant new possibilities in medical imaging, and nanocrystals, which power important advances in semiconductors.

The list goes on and has no limits.

"There is an infinite number of nanoparticles, limited only by imagination and the demands of the marketplace," says Andrew Maynard, senior scientist for the Woodrow Wilson Center's Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies.

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