Hello. My name is Elena Brewer and I'm Associate Professor at SUNY Erie Community College teaching courses for nanotechnology, for electrical engineering technology and physics. Today I would like to talk with you about what is nanotechnology and a little bit about fields related to nano and what industries are utilizing nanotechnology. What is nanotechnology? I like definition by National Nanotechnology Initiative, which define it as manipulation of matter with at least the one dimension sized from 1-100 nanometers and exploitation of novel material properties and phenomena at the same scale. Very good. But how smaller is a nanometer? Well, it's one-billionths of a meter, which is still pretty abstract. How small is that? I'll give you a little quiz. If we take one nanometer and increase it in size to about the size of a marble, what would you think one meter would become? The diameter of the Earth, Sun, moon, football stadium? Of course, you all guessed correctly. It's going to be roughly the size of the diameter of Earth. That's how drastic is the difference between a meter and one nanometer. Why are we so obsessed about producing devices on a such small scale? What do we get from that? Well, you guys are all familiar with this. Everybody has one of them in your pocket, so it's a smartphone. That little small handheld device has a lot of functionality which used to require separate piece of equipment for each functionality. For example, it can work as a TV, used to be a big box standing in a corner of the room. Video camera. I don't know if you remember seeing those ones, people would hold it on a shoulder or on a tripod. Now you have a handheld camera in your phone. Calculator. Yes, you can have many calculators programmed if you have a specific app for that. How about music player, that's a big one. Your phone can double as a music player, pretty good quality as well, and a portable gaming device. What else can we have set? We can put a whole computer in your handheld device. What you guys see on a picture here is a computer from roughly 1950s, 1960s which would occupy the whole room. Your handheld device, your smartphone is now more powerful than a computer which would take the whole room. How cool is that? That's why we love making things small and smaller because it gives you a lot of functionality in a very small package, and people loves that. Nanotechnology is absolutely not limited to just electronics. I mean, you do have it in electronics like TVs and computers, but you also can find it in optics. Any optics, let's say you're looking at binocular or telescopes or even just glasses, if you're wearing one of those, it's probably has thin film coating from antireflective coating. That's done with nanotechnology. If you guys look at the picture on top, you can see a car. Everything from components of the car to even pins could use a nanotechnology processes. How about using carbon nanotubes, which is another very cool thing in nanotechnology to make very light and very strong materials. You can find them as in a bike frame or you can find them in golf clubs and tennis rackets. It keeps materials very light and at the same time much stronger. Of course, I cannot forget about biological and medical applications because either you're working in development of new drug delivery systems, you can use nanotechnology, or if you're looking at prosthetics or things like hip replacement or to use implants. A lot of characterization for the surfaces is done by using nanotech, and that's what allows those type of devices to stay within your body and not be rejected by your immune system. This is obviously not all, but this just gives you a little bit of a taste where nanotechnology can be found, and as such, nanotechnology requires important understanding from a lot of branches in science and technology. It includes surface science, semiconductor physics, organic chemistry, or regular inorganic chemistry as well, molecular biology, you can find it also developments in energy storage, nanomedicine, nanoelectronics, and list can be very long. Some of the industries which require skilled nanotechnologists and nanoengineers, those are electronic and semiconductor industry, which also includes fabrication of solar cells, biotechnology, medical, pharmaceutical, also optics and optoelectronics, MEMS, material design and testing. Believe it or not, water purification uses a lot of filters built with nanotech, forensics. If you ever watched CSI Miami, you've seen scanning electron microscope feature at quite often shows that nanotechnology. Even if you are in a sales and marketing for a company which produces characterization equipment to look at things at nanoscale, you have to have a lot of educational background to understand what you're dealing with. Of course, if you're doing research to development or teaching, you have to know a lot from different areas and fields of science. That concludes part 1 of my short introduction to nanotechnology and to what it is about, and I'll see you guys for part 2 shortly.
