Nanotechnology is the idea that we can create devices and machines all the way down to the nanometer scale, which is a billionth of a meter, about half the width of a human DNA molecule.
I would say the first three or four papers on nano-thermoelectricity in bismuth went almost unnoticed, but all of a sudden when Dirac cones came along - pop! - there was huge interest in bismuth-related materials.
When a nanotech company matures and becomes a real business, it becomes something else. It becomes a biotech company or a cleantech company or a memory chip company. Nanotechnology has fueled the core innovations in electronics and energy.
When I understood the rudiments of what nanotech was all about, I knew I wanted to participate.
In the process of making nanomaterials, we learned that with the electronic density of states, the phonon electronic properties and everything change at the nano-level. So the thermoelectric properties would also be changed.
Carbon has this genius of making a chemically stable, two-dimensional, one-atom-thick membrane in a three-dimensional world. And that, I believe, is going to be very important in the future of chemistry and technology in general.
The science of semiconducting and metallic polymers is inherently interdisciplinary; it falls at the intersection of chemistry and physics.
I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.
Graphene is dead; long live graphene.
Nanoengineering is learning how to make devices as small as 10 to 100 atoms in width. Much of the work is going on in the electronics industry, where there is great demand to pack more components onto computer chips.
One of the issues in electronics is that we work only in two scales - transistors and collections of transistors - and that's the device. But to take full advantage of nano, we're going to have to think about that full hierarchy of levels of structure.
Nanotechnology is an idea that most people simply didn't believe.
Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We'll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today.
The holy grail would be to turn a knob, and out comes the nanotube of the right diameter and chirality.
Administrators and scientists are excited by buckyballs for their own sake, and if they turn out to have practical applications, so much the better.
Carbon nanotubes are amazing because they're really good electrical conductors, yet they are only a few atoms in diameter. You can make transistors out of them in the same way you can with silicon. At Berkeley, we made the narrowest device anybody had ever made. It was basically a single molecule.
It's amazing that something only an atom thick can be an impenetrable barrier. You can have gas on one side and vacuum or liquid on the other, and with a wall only one atom thick, nothing would go through it.
A carbon nanotube is just a graphene sheet that's rolled up seamlessly, and this happens in nature; carbon nanotubes are found in mineral deposits around the planet.
Graphene is a single plane of graphite that has to be pulled out of bulk graphite to show its amazing properties.
Life is nanotechnology that works.
