Nanotechnology may have implications in medicine and industry

A cobalt atom is dragged across the surface of copper atoms. It makes a whining, creaking, clunking noise as the chemical bonds form and break.

This is the sound of nanotechnology.

An audience of University of Arizona researchers and community members listened in awe at this "song of the atom" Monday, as Stanford professor Hari Manoharan lectured on atomic and molecular assembly. This forms the basis of nanotechnology, a relatively new and highly talked about field of science.

Nanotechnology, deemed important and novel enough by the Clinton administration to create a National Nanotechnology Initiative, is essentially the study of the tiny - getting down to length scales of 1 to 100 nanometers, or as small as a billionth of a meter.

With roots in engineering and physics, nanotechnology also involves chemistry and biology as it focuses on study at the molecular level of matter.

"Extending measurements down to the smallest-length scales of single atoms and molecules" enables scientists to manipulate materials on the molecular scale, Manoharan said.

Working with such tiny measurements can allow for building "from the bottom up" and to potentially make new "designer molecules," Manoharan said.

"The practical payoffs are vast," he said, "but we have a ways to go between turning the science into viable technologies."

These technologies may include medicine, communication and computer science - all of which can be greatly altered by new nanotechnology research.

Charles Stafford, a UA physics professor, works on the formation of nanowires, or wires as thin as single atoms. "If you extrapolate the trend" of how quickly nanotechnology research is growing, he said, "everyday technology will involve atomic-scale devices by about 2020."

Much of the work in nanotechnology today is focused of "proof of principle," he said. "We're trying to understand how things work when they're that small. We're somewhat guided by applications, but first we have to show that this is possible in principle."

An example of this, as Manoharan explained in his lecture, is the experimental success of teleporting an atom - or moving it instantaneously from one place to another - in the laboratory. Although it was moved only by a few nanometers and was not reproduced to 100 percent completion, proving that an atom can be teleported is still proof of principle, he said.

Manoharan's lab equipment for atomic manipulation includes a complex set of vacuum chambers and scanning microscopes and requires a temperature of slightly above absolute zero to maintain precision. The experiments are so sensitive that "just talking in the lab is enough to interfere with the results," he said.

"Things are very exploratory right now," Manoharan said. "We built a whole new playing field, and now we're playing around to see what's possible."