History of Inventions - Nanotechnology

Already around 600 BC. people were producing nanotype structures, i.e. cementite strands in steel, called Wootz. This happened in India, and this can be considered the beginning of the history of nanotechnology.

VI-XV p. The dyes used during this period for painting stained-glass windows use gold chloride nanoparticles, chlorides of other metals, as well as metal oxides.

IX-XVII centuries In many places in Europe, "glitters" and other substances are produced to give shine to ceramics and other products. They contained nanoparticles of metals, most often silver or copper.

XIII-xviii w. The “Damascus steel” produced in these centuries, from which the world famous white weapons were made, contains carbon nanotubes and cementite nanofibers.

1857 Michael Faraday discovers ruby-coloured colloidal gold, characteristic of gold nanoparticles.

1931 Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska build an electron microscope in Berlin, the first device to see the structure of nanoparticles at the atomic level. The greater the energy of the electrons, the shorter their wavelength and the greater the resolution of the microscope. The sample is in a vacuum and most often covered with a metal film. The electron beam passes through the tested object and enters the detectors. Based on the measured signals, the electronic devices recreate the image of the test sample.

1936 Erwin Müller, working at the Siemens Laboratories, invents the field emission microscope, the simplest form of an emission electron microscope. This microscope uses a strong electric field for field emission and imaging.

1950 Victor La Mer and Robert Dinegar create the theoretical foundations for the technique of obtaining monodisperse colloidal materials. This allowed the production of special types of paper, paints and thin films on an industrial scale.

1956 Arthur von Hippel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) coined the term "molecular engineering".

1959 Richard Feynman lectures on "There's plenty of room at the bottom." Starting by imagining what it would take to fit a 24-volume Encyclopædia Britannica on a pinhead, he introduced the concept of miniaturization and the possibility of using technologies that could work at the nanometer level. On this occasion, he established two awards (the so-called Feynman Prizes) for achievements in this area - one thousand dollars each.

1960 The first prize payout disappointed Feynman. He assumed that a technological breakthrough would be required to achieve his goals, but at the time he underestimated the potential of microelectronics. The winner was 35-year-old engineer William H. McLellan. He created a motor weighing 250 micrograms, with a power of 1 mW.

1968 Alfred Y. Cho and John Arthur develop the epitaxy method. It allows the formation of surface monoatomic layers using semiconductor technology - the growth of new single-crystal layers on an existing crystalline substrate, duplicating the structure of the existing crystalline substrate substrate. A variation of epitaxy is the epitaxy of molecular compounds, which makes it possible to deposit crystalline layers with a thickness of one atomic layer. This method is used in the production of quantum dots and so-called thin layers.

1974 Introduction of the term "nanotechnology". It was first used by University of Tokyo researcher Norio Taniguchi at a scientific conference. The definition of Japanese physics remains in use to this day and sounds like this: “Nanotechnology is a production using technology that allows achieving very high accuracy and extremely small sizes, i.e. accuracy of the order of 1 nm.

Visualization of a quantum drop

80s and 90s The period of rapid development of lithographic technology and the production of ultrathin layers of crystals. The first, MOCVD(), is a method for depositing layers on the surface of materials using gaseous organometallic compounds. This is one of the epitaxial methods, hence its alternative name - MOSFE (). The second method, MBE, allows the deposition of very thin nanometer layers with a precisely defined chemical composition and precise distribution of the impurity concentration profile. This is possible due to the fact that the layer components are supplied to the substrate by separate molecular beams.

1981 Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer create the scanning tunneling microscope. Using the forces of interatomic interactions, it allows you to obtain an image of the surface with a resolution of the order of the size of a single atom, by passing the blade above or below the surface of the sample. In 1989, the device was used to manipulate individual atoms. Binnig and Rohrer were awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics.

1985 Louis Brus of Bell Labs discovers colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals (quantum dots). They are defined as a small area of ​​space, limited in three dimensions by potential barriers, when a particle with a wavelength comparable to the size of a dot enters.

Cover of the book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology by C. Eric Drexler

1985 Robert Floyd Curl, Jr., Harold Walter Kroto, and Richard Erret Smalley discover fullerenes, molecules made up of an even number of carbon atoms (from 28 to about 1500) that form a closed hollow body. The chemical properties of fullerenes are in many respects similar to those of aromatic hydrocarbons. Fullerene C60, or buckminsterfullerene, like other fullerenes, is an allotropic form of carbon.

1986-1992 C. Eric Drexler publishes two important books on futurology that popularize nanotechnology. The first, released in 1986, is called Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. He predicts, among other things, that future technologies will be able to manipulate individual atoms in a controlled manner. In 1992, he published Nanosystems: Molecular Hardware, Manufacturing, and the Computational Idea, which in turn predicted that nanomachines could reproduce themselves.

1989 Donald M. Aigler of IBM puts the word "IBM" - made from 35 xenon atoms - on a nickel surface.

1991 Sumio Iijima of NEC in Tsukuba, Japan, discovers carbon nanotubes, hollow cylindrical structures. To date, the best known carbon nanotubes, the walls of which are made of rolled graphene. There are also non-carbon nanotubes and DNA nanotubes. The thinnest carbon nanotubes are on the order of one nanometer in diameter and can be millions of times longer. They have remarkable tensile strength and unique electrical properties, and are excellent conductors of heat. These properties make them promising materials for applications in nanotechnology, electronics, optics, and materials science.

1993 Warren Robinett of the University of North Carolina and R. Stanley Williams of UCLA are building a virtual reality system linked to a scanning tunneling microscope that allows the user to see and even touch atoms.

1998 The Cees Dekker team at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands is building a transistor that uses carbon nanotubes. Currently, scientists are trying to use the unique properties of carbon nanotubes to produce better and faster electronics that consume less electricity. This was limited by a number of factors, some of which were gradually overcome, which in 2016 led researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create a carbon transistor with better parameters than the best silicon prototypes. Research by Michael Arnold and Padma Gopalan led to the development of a carbon nanotube transistor that can carry twice the current of its silicon competitor.

2003 Samsung patents an advanced technology based on the action of microscopic silver ions to kill germs, mold and more than six hundred types of bacteria and prevent their spread. Silver particles have been introduced into the company's most important filtration systems - all filters and the dust collector or bag.

2004 The British Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering publish the report "Nanoscience and Nanotechnology: Opportunities and Uncertainties", calling for research into the potential risks of nanotechnology for health, the environment and society, taking into account ethical and legal aspects.

Nanomotor model on fullerene wheels

2006 James Tour, together with a team of scientists from Rice University, constructs a microscopic "van" from the oligo (phenyleneethynylene) molecule, the axles of which are made of aluminum atoms, and the wheels are made of C60 fullerenes. The nanovehicle moved over the surface, consisting of gold atoms, under the influence of temperature increase, due to the rotation of fullerene "wheels". Above a temperature of 300 ° C, it accelerated so much that chemists could no longer track it ...

2007 Technion nanotechnologists fit the entire Jewish "Old Testament" into an area of ​​just 0,5 mm² gold-plated silicon wafer. The text was engraved by directing a focused stream of gallium ions onto the plate.

2009-2010 Nadrian Seaman and colleagues at New York University are creating a series of DNA-like nanomounts in which synthetic DNA structures can be programmed to "produce" other structures with desired shapes and properties.

2013 IBM scientists are creating an animated film that can only be viewed after being magnified 100 million times. It is called "The Boy and His Atom" and is drawn with diatomic dots one billionth of a meter in size, which are single molecules of carbon monoxide. The cartoon depicts a boy who first plays with a ball and then jumps on a trampoline. One of the molecules also plays the role of a ball. All action takes place on a copper surface, and the size of each film frame does not exceed several tens of nanometers.

2014 Scientists from the ETH University of Technology in Zurich have succeeded in creating a porous membrane less than one nanometer thick. The thickness of the material obtained through nanotechnological manipulation is 100 XNUMX. times smaller than that of a human hair. According to the members of the team of authors, this is the thinnest porous material that could be obtained and is generally possible. It consists of two layers of a two-dimensional graphene structure. The membrane is permeable, but only to small particles, slowing down or completely trapping larger particles.

2015 A molecular pump is being created, a nanoscale device that transfers energy from one molecule to another, mimicking natural processes. The layout was designed by researchers at the Weinberg Northwestern College of Arts and Sciences. The mechanism is reminiscent of biological processes in proteins. It is expected that such technologies will find application mainly in the fields of biotechnology and medicine, for example, in artificial muscles.

2016 According to a publication in the scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology, researchers at the Dutch Technical University Delft have developed groundbreaking single-atom storage media. The new method should provide more than five hundred times higher storage density than any currently used technology. The authors note that even better results can be achieved using a three-dimensional model of the location of particles in space.

Classification of nanotechnologies and nanomaterials

1. Nanotechnological structures include:

• quantum wells, wires and dots, i.e. various structures that combine the following feature - the spatial limitation of particles in a certain area through potential barriers;
• plastics, the structure of which is controlled at the level of individual molecules, thanks to which it is possible, for example, to obtain materials with unprecedented mechanical properties;
• artificial fibers - materials with a very precise molecular structure, also distinguished by unusual mechanical properties;
• nanotubes, supramolecular structures in the form of hollow cylinders. To date, the best known carbon nanotubes, the walls of which are made of folded graphene (monatomic graphite layers). There are also non-carbon nanotubes (for example, from tungsten sulfide) and from DNA;
• materials crushed in the form of dust, the grains of which are, for example, accumulations of metal atoms. Silver () with strong antibacterial properties is widely used in this form;
• nanowires (for example, silver or copper);
• elements formed using electron lithography and other nanolithography methods;
• fullerenes;
• graphene and other two-dimensional materials (borophene, graphene, hexagonal boron nitride, silicene, germanene, molybdenum sulfide);
• composite materials reinforced with nanoparticles.

Nanolithographic surface

2. The classification of nanotechnologies in the systematics of sciences, developed in 2004 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD):

• nanomaterials (production and properties);
• nanoprocesses (nanoscale applications - biomaterials belong to industrial biotechnology).

3. Nanomaterials are all materials in which there are regular structures at the molecular level, i.e. not exceeding 100 nanometers.

This limit may refer to the size of the domains as the basic unit of microstructure, or to the thickness of the layers obtained or deposited on the substrate. In practice, the limit below which is attributed to nanomaterials is different for materials with different performance properties - it is mainly associated with the appearance of specific properties when exceeded. By reducing the size of the ordered structures of materials, it is possible to significantly improve their physicochemical, mechanical, and other properties.

Nanomaterials can be divided into the following four groups:

• zero-dimensional (dot nanomaterials) - for example, quantum dots, silver nanoparticles;
• one-dimensional – for example, metal or semiconductor nanowires, nanorods, polymeric nanofibers;
• two-dimensional – for example, nanometer layers of a single-phase or multi-phase type, graphene and other materials with a thickness of one atom;
• three dimensional (or nanocrystalline) - consist of crystalline domains and accumulations of phases with sizes of the order of nanometers or composites reinforced with nanoparticles.