Nanotechnology: the next big ideaWeek 1: The nitty gritty

Maryse de la Giroday6-week course

SFU Liberal Arts & Adults 55+ program

Course overview

• Week 1: Nanotechnology: The Nitty Gritty• Week 2: Not as New as You Might Think• Week 3: Pop Culture Portrayals of

Nanotechnology• Week 4: Violent and Other Confrontations• Week 5: The Geo-political Situation• Week 6: Nanotechnology: Social and Scientific

Implications

Introductions

• Who are you?

Maryse de la Giroday

• Largest, independent, science blog in Canada• Nanotechnology focus• Technical writer, science writer, arts writer,

marketing communications writer, etc.• Founding member of Science Borealis• One of two bloggers mentioned in Science

Culture: Where Canada Stands (Council of Canadian Academies [RSC, CAE, and CAHS)

Maryse de la Giroday

• My Nanotech Mysteries wiki is mentioned in 3rd edition of Digital Storytelling (Carolyn Handler Miller)

• MA (creative writing and new media); project: The Nanotech Mysteries (wiki)

• Have taught in the SFU writing program & elsewhere

• About to write a series on alternatives to animal testing for SEURAT-1 (EU project)

Counterintuitive introduction to definitions

• Buckminsterfullerenes (1985)• Carbon Nanotubes (1991)• Graphene (2004)

Buckminsterfullerene

• Credit: Benjah-bmm2 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Buckminsterfullerene-2D-skeletal.png]

Carbon nanotube

• http://inhabitat.com/carbon-nanotubes-could-create-better-solar-cells/

Graphene (1 of 2)

Graphene (2 of 2)

• 2-dimensional• Graphene is an atomic-scale honeycomb

lattice made of carbon atoms.• The ideal crystalline structure of graphene is a

hexagonal grid. Uploaded by AlexanderAlUS Created: August 26, 2010 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene#mediaviewer/File:Graphen.jpg]

What is the error? (1 of 2)

• Quantum Nano Centre (QNC), which officially opened on Sept. 21, 2012

What is the error? (2 of 2)

• The exterior is distinguished by a hexagonal honeycomb lattice of structural steel, a pattern inspired by the stable hexagonal carbon structure of the nanotube.

• http://www.frogheart.ca/?p=8144 quoting a news release from the architects: Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg (KPMB)

Risk Bites videos

• Carbon nanotubes• http://www.frogheart.ca/?p=9543

Carbon nanotubes and the MacArthur genius award (1 of 4)

• Mark Hersam, a professor of materials science engineering, chemistry and medicine at Northwestern University, has developed a method to separate nanomaterials by size, therefore providing a consistency in properties otherwise not available. Moreover, the solution came straight from the life sciences–biochemistry, in fact.

Carbon nanotubes and the MacArthur genius award (2 of 4)

• The technique, known as density gradient ultracentrifugation, is a decades-old process used to separate biomolecules. The National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientist theorized correctly that he could adapt it to separate carbon nanotubes, rolled sheets of graphene (a single atomic layer of hexagonally bonded carbon atoms), long recognized for their potential applications in computers and tablets, smart phones and other portable devices, photovoltaics, batteries and bioimaging.

Carbon nanotubes and the MacArthur genius award (3 of 4)

• The technique has proved so successful that Hersam and his team now hold two dozen pending or issued patents, and in 2007 established their own company, NanoIntegris, jump-started with a $150,000 NSF small business grant. The company has been able to scale up production by 10,000-fold, and currently has 700 customers in 40 countries.“We now have the capacity to produce ten times the worldwide demand for this material,” Hersam says.

Carbon nanotubes and the MacArthur genius award (4 of 4)

• What’s the problem with this description of the MacArthur website?– Graphene, a single atomic layer of hexagonally

bonded carbon atoms, and carbon nanotubes, rolled sheets of graphene in single or multiple layers, have long been recognized for their potential applications in electronics, photovoltaics, batteries, and bioimaging.

• http://www.frogheart.ca/?p=14950 (video)

A list of sizes (going up)

• 1024 yotta Y • 1021 zetta Z • 1018 exa E • 1015 peta P • 1012 tera T • 109 giga G • 106 mega M • 103 kilo k • 102 hecto h • 101 deka da

A list of sizes (going down)

• 10-1 deci d • 10-2 centi c • 10-3 milli m • 10-6 micro µ • 10-9 nano n • 10-12 pico p • 10-15 femto f • 10-18 atto a • 10-21 zepto z • 10-24 yocto y• (US NIST: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html)

Nano in English

• tenth 1795 (deci)• hundredth 1795 (centi)• thousandth 1795 (milli)• millionth 1960 (micro)• billionth 1960 (nano)• trillionth 1960 (pico)• quadrillionth 1964 (femto)• quintillionth 1964 (atto)• sextillionth 1991 (zepto)• septillionth 1991 (yocto)• (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano-)

What is nano?

• From a 2008 news item, on CBC online,• Nanotechnology, which is Latin for “dwarf

technology,” [emphasis mine] has medical and industrial applications. It is the science of building machines on an atomic and molecular scale, or the making or manipulating of tiny particles such as atoms and molecules on the scale of a nanometre, which is one-billionth of a metre. (http://www.frogheart.ca/?p=483)

Is nano all Greek to us?

• The prefix is derived from the Greek νᾶνος, meaning "dwarf", and was officially confirmed as standard in 1960.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano-• From Latin nanus (“dwarf”), from Ancient

Greek νᾶνος (nânos).• http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nano-

Nano is

• A billionth – time as in nanosecond– distance as in nanometre– volume as in nanogram/nanolitre

• Nanotechnology is not a translation from the Latin or the Greek and it is definitely not ‘dwarf technology’

Nanomaterials/nanoparticles

• Quantum dots• Silver (gold, titanium dioxide, zinc oxide, etc.)

nanoparticles• Carbon nanotubes• Lignin nanotubes• Graphene• Buckminsterfullerenes ,aka, fullerenes• Etc.

Introductions to nanotechnology (1 of 2)

• What is nano org? Has many introductory nano videos.

• http://whatisnano.org/• Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Cm90Md81zZQ

• Kavli Foundation (2007)• Narrated by Alan Alda, this introduction to

nanoscience gives us a brief overview of the field and illuminates some of the interesting questions being currently researched.

Introductions to nanotechnology (2 of 2)

• Scopey intro. to nano (Alberta’s Ingenuity Lab video)

• http://ingenuitylab.ca/nextgen/scopey/• Trynano.org (IEEE [Institute of Electrical and

Electronics Engineers] and IBM and the New York Hall of Science)

• http://trynano.org/

Nanoscience/Nanotechnology (1 of 2)

• Richard Feynman (1959 “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html) contested history (more in week 2)

• Norio Taniguchi (coined the term ‘nanotechnology’ in 1974; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norio_Taniguchi)

Nanoscience/Nanotechnology (2 of 2)

• An engineer (Taniguchi) coming out of an applied science community (technology) coined the phrase and debates as to the distinction between nanoscience and nanotechnology have been occurring ever since.

Physics: theoretical/experimental/applied

• http://theconversation.com/looking-at-the-future-through-graphene-goggles-31349

• Physicist: Michael Fuhrer

Nanotechnology gets known

• K. Eric Drexler, an engineer who studied with Feynman, popularized nanotechnology with his book Engines of Creation (1986)

• His latest book is Radical Abundance (2013).• http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UU_qq

MD08PFrDfPREoBEL6IQ&feature=player_detailpage&v=ylOCEmlnyHk

• Proselytizer (hints at hype associated with nano)

‘Micro’scopy

• Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer at IBM Zürich invented the scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) in 1981

• A scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is an instrument for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. Its development earned its inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope)

Don Eigler/STM/xenon

• Wired

Eigler’s accomplishment

• Twenty years ago this week, on Sept. 28, 1989, an IBM physicist, Don Eigler, became the first person to manipulate and position individual atoms. Less than two months later, he arranged 35 Xenon atoms to spell out the letters IBM. Writing those three characters took about 22 hours. Today, the process would take about 15 minutes.

• “We wanted to show we could position atoms in a way that’s very similar to how a child builds with Lego blocks,” says Eigler who works at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. “You take the blocks where you want them to go.” (http://www.wired.com/2009/09/gallery-atomic-science/all/)

STM gave birth to scanning probe microscopy

• http://virtual.itg.uiuc.edu/training/AFM_tutorial/ (video)

• Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and TechnologyUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Microscopy is a bit of a misnomer with STM and AFM

• STM & AFM are haptic devices• The probes relay information about ‘touch’ • These are not optical devices• The data derived from the probe’s interaction

with a surface is sent through a computer programme which then creates an image for the scientist.

20 bromine atoms and a Swiss Cross

• http://www.frogheart.ca/?p=14830 (July 21, 2014 post)

Looks like I B M but has different meaning

• The manipulation of atoms has reached a new level: Together with teams from Finland and Japan, physicists from the University of Basel were able to place 20 single atoms on a fully insulated surface at room temperature to form the smallest “Swiss cross,” thus taking a big step towards next generation atomic-scale storage devices. …

University of Victoria & its microscope (1 of 3)

• This new microscope at the University of Victoria (UVic) was supposed to be unveiled in 2011 according to my July 28, 2009 posting about the purchase …

• From: http://www.frogheart.ca/?p=10426 a June 18, 2013 posting

University of Victoria & its microscope (2 of 3)

• The world’s most powerful microscope, which resides in a specially constructed room at the University of Victoria, has now been fully assembled and tested, and has a lineup of scientists and businesses eager to use it.

• The seven-tonne, 4.5-metre tall Scanning Transmission Electron Holography Microscope (STEHM), the first such microscope of its type in the world, came to the university in parts last year,. A team from Hitachi, which constructed the ultra high-resolution, ultra-stable instrument, spent one year painstakingly assembling the STEHM in a carefully controlled lab in the basement of the Bob Wright Centre.

University of Victoria & its microscope (3 of 3)

• Herring viewed gold atoms through the microscope at a resolution of 35 picometres. One picometre is a trillionth of a metre. This resolution is much better than the previous best image with 49-picometre resolution taken at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in California, and is about 20 million times human sight [sic] .

• The STEHM allows researchers to see the atoms in a manner never before possible. It has full analytical capabilities that can determine the types and number or elements present, and high-resolution cameras for collecting data.

Brief bit about STEM (scanning transmission electron microscopy)

• http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/multimedia/2014/jan/21/scanning-transmission-electron-microscopy-explained

• In this film, SuperSTEM's Demie Kepaptsoglou explains how a STEM works and why the technique is a crucial tool for material scientists. She talks about how a STEM is used to do atom-by-atom analysis of graphene. She also previews the capabilities of the next microscope to be installed at the facility. Called SuperSTEM III, the instrument will be one of the best in the world and should be up and running later this year.

Graphene, you sexy thing you

• Located at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, SuperSTEM played an important role in the characterization of graphene by taking the first lattice images of the material. Graphene was first isolated in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the nearby University of Manchester, which is a member of SuperSTEM along with the universities of Leeds, Liverpool, Glasgow and Oxford. Geim and Novoselov bagged the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics for their efforts and graphene remains a hot topic in condensed-matter physics.

Flagship projects in Europe

• Graphene• The Human Brain• 1B Euros each over 10 years (announcement

made in Jan. 2013; http://www.frogheart.ca/?p=9081)

• In the UK there are at least two major graphene centres– University of Manchester– Cambridge University

Back to ‘micro’scopy (nanoscopy)

• ... the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented a limitation.

• Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension.In what has become known as nanoscopy, scientists visualize the pathways of individual molecules inside living cells. They can see how molecules create synapses between nerve cells in the brain; they can track proteins involved in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases as they aggregate; they follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as these divide into embryos. (http://www.frogheart.ca/?p=14830)

NPL acknowledges Nobel prize winners (1 of 3)

• In 1873, the microscopist Ernst Abbe stipulated a physical limit for the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopy: it could never become better than 0.2 micrometres. Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 for having bypassed this limit. Due to their achievements the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld.

NPL acknowledges Nobel prize winners (2 of 3)

• Super-resolution microscopes use the fluorescence of molecules to build up images at a higher resolution than was presumed possible for most of the 20th century. This allows scientists to see near molecular-level detail inside cells, including structures such as proteins and viruses.

• In collaboration with the University of Cambridge, NPL has implemented a variant of the single-molecule microscopy technique known as STORM (stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy), which can achieve resolutions up to 10 times better than traditional optical microscopes.

NPL acknowledges Nobel prize winners (3 of 3)

• It does this by using fluorescent dyes to label molecules within cells. These dyes can be switched on and off, and by doing so the centre position of each individual fluorescent molecule can be identified and plotted. The process is repeated thousands of times to build up a highly detailed, super-resolution image using all of the plotted positions from every repetition.

• Work from the field being done at UK’s National Physical Laboratory: http://www.azonano.com/news.aspx?newsID=31286

At the scale of the atom

• There is no absolute gap between living and nonliving.

• Process and reality, 1929, by Alfred North Whitehead (paraphrasing: A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality Paperback – Sep 15 1981 by Donald W. Sherburne)

New understandings at the nanoscale (1 of 2)

• Do the principles of quantum mechanics apply to biological systems? Until now, says Prof. Ron Naaman of the Institute’s Chemical Physics Department (Faculty of Chemistry), both biologists and physicists have considered quantum systems and biological molecules to be like apples and oranges. But research he conducted together with scientists in Germany, which appeared recently in Science, definitively shows that a biological molecule – DNA – can discern between quantum states known as spin.

• (http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/biological-molecules-select-their-spin#.VEGMCFet--Y) April 2011

New understandings at the nanoscale (2 of 2)

• At any one time, one quarter of water molecules in the uppermost layer have one hydrogen atom in water and the other vibrating freely above. Such molecules straddle gas and liquid phases, according to a new study that bears on atmospheric chemistry and raises the question of how exactly to define the air-water boundary.

• (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110608131322.htm)

Silver nanoparticles: liquid on the outside; crystal on the inside (1 of 2)

• A surprising phenomenon has been found in metal nanoparticles: They appear, from the outside, to be liquid droplets, wobbling and readily changing shape, while their interiors retain a perfectly stable crystal configuration.

• The research team behind the finding, led by MIT professor Ju Li, says the work could have important implications for the design of components in nanotechnology, such as metal contacts for molecular electronic circuits.

Silver nanoparticles: liquid on the outside; crystal on the inside (2 of 2)

• The experiments were conducted at room temperature, with particles of pure silver less than 10 nanometers across — less than one-thousandth of the width of a human hair. [emphasis mine] But the results should apply to many different metals, says Li, senior author of the paper and the BEA Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering.

• (http://www.frogheart.ca/?p=14861) Oct. 14, 2014 post

Big business/small chips (1 of 2)

• On the heels of Intel’s announcement about a deal utilizing their 14nm low-power manufacturing process and speculations about a 10nm computer chip (my July 9, 2014 posting), IBM makes an announcement about a 7nm chip

• http://www.frogheart.ca/?p=14066 July 11, 2014 post

Big business/small chips (2 of 2)

• A July 8, 2014 news item on Azonano describes a manufacturing agreement between Intel and Panasonic,

• Intel Corporation today announced that it has entered into a manufacturing agreement with Panasonic Corporation’s System LSI Business Division. Intel’s custom foundry business will manufacture future Panasonic system-on-chips (SoCs) using Intel’s 14nm low-power manufacturing process. (http://www.frogheart.ca/?p=14032 July 9, 2014 posting)

Which companies are most interested in nano?

Cosmetics and nano (1 of 2)

• Cosmetics companies are deeply invested in nanotechnology research, L'Oreal is the sixth largest patent holder in the US (more than GE Electric, Motorola, or Eastman Kodak). Their direct competitors such as Estee Lauder, Shiseido, Christian Dior, and Proctor & Gamble are also heavily involved in adding nanoparticles to cosmetic products. L'Oreal has been researching the nanotechnology area since the 1980s and introduced its first 'nano' products in 1990.

Cosmetics and nano (2 of 2)

• Revitalift, a heavily advertised L'Oreal product, uses 'nanosomes' to transport vitamins and other active ingredients into the skin's outer layer. (Nanotech Mysteries,2006, http://nanotechmysteries.pbworks.com/w/page/12355755/Marketers%20put%20the%20buy%20in%20nano)

Nanotechnology applications

• Environment• Energy• Health• Fashion• Electronics• Visual art/music/dance• Prosthetics• Biomimicry