Nanotech Facts

Scanning tunneling microscope image of iron atoms on copper, with electron movement.Using the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), electron formations can be viewed. At left, electrons are surrounded by 48 iron atoms, individually positioned with the same STM used to image them. The image was created and colorized at the IBM Almaden research laboratory in California.

Think small. Think really, really small—smaller than anything you ever saw through a microscope at school. Think atoms and molecules, and now you’re there. You’re down at the nanoscale, where scientists are learning about these fundamental components of matter and are putting them to use in beneficial ways.

It’s a relatively new area of science that has generated excitement worldwide. Working at the nanoscale, scientists today are creating new tools, products and technologies to address some of the world’s biggest challenges, including

  • clean, secure affordable energy
  • stronger, lighter, more durable materials
  • low-cost filters to provide clean drinking water
  • medical devices and drugs to detect and treat diseases more effectively with fewer side effects
  • lighting that uses a fraction of the energy
  • sensors to detect and identify harmful chemical or biological agents
  • techniques to clean up hazardous chemicals in the environment

What is Nano?

What is Nano? answers questions about nanoscale, nanoscience and nanotechnology. The Scale of Things and Nanoscale: 3 examples illustrate how small nano really is.

Putting Nanotechnology to Use

Over the past two decades, scientists and engineers have been mastering the intricacies of working with nanoscale materials.

  • Products using nanoscale materials and processes now available.
  • Nanotechnology and clean water: Researchers recently discovered unexpected magnetic interactions between ultra small specks of rust, which can help remove arsenic from drinking water.
  • Jumbotron lamps. For example, a new form of carbon, the nanotube, was discovered by Sumio Iijima in 1991. In 1995, it was recognized that carbon nanotubes were excellent sources of field-emitted electrons. By 2000, the “jumbotron lamp,” a nanotube-based light source that uses these field-emitted electrons to bombard a phosphor, was commercially available. Today, jumbotron lamps light many athletic stadiums. By contrast, the period of time between the modeling of the semiconducting property of germanium in 1931 and the first commercial product (the transistor radio) was 23 years.
  • Buckyballs. The discovery of another nanoscale carbon form, C60, the fullerene (also called the buckyball) brought the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 to Robert F. Curl Jr., Sir Harold W. Kroto, and Richard E. Smalley. It also started an avalanche of research into not only the novel characteristics of C60, but also other nanoscale materials.

Frequently Asked Questions about Nanotechnology

The National Nanotechnology Initiative provides answers to frequently asked questions about nanoscience and nanotechnology.

Microscopes and Nanoscale science

Nanoscale science was enabled by advances in microscopy, most notably the electron, scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopes, among others. The 1986 Nobel Prize for Physics honored three of the inventors of the electron and scanning tunnel microscopes, Ernst Ruska, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer.