Nano Inside

Nanotechnology is mentioned as an emerging field for the last two decades. Yet, if you ask an arbitrary person at the street where nanotechnology is employed. Probably, he won’t be able to answer this question. Because, almost no nanotechnology-based product bares “nano inside” labels. It is amazing to acknowledge in how many applications nanotechnology can provide an outstanding breakthrough, which is just impossible in the “macro” world. For example, in medicine, nanoparticles can be used for organ directed drug delivery, for high accuracy diagnostics or for local enhancement of radiation therapy phenomena. If you select any given nano-material, you can find that it has been examined in extreme variety of applications. Combination of controllable electrical properties with small dimensionality of these structures make them attractive alternative for future electronic devices or transparent electronics. At the same time they are examined as outstanding polymer reinforcing materials due to their high strength properties. It is even more amazing to acknowledge that by controlling the size of the nanoparticles, you can actually control their physical properties, such as conductivity or optical absorbance (i.e. color). It’s this high flexibility of physical properties of nanomaterials that attracts to nanotechnology so much attention of different scientific and engineering communities.

Although the fruits and application of nanotechnology are an outcome of basic scientific and engineering areas, nanotechnology is acknowledged as an independent, interdisciplinary field. In contrast to disciplines division in “macro”-world, in nano-technology you ca

nnot be “only” chemist, physicist or electrical engineer. You have to expand your knowledge to adjacent fields. If you develop light emitting devices based on nanotechnology, you must use at least basic chemistry to synthesize the nanoparticles. Architecture of the device is prescribed by basic understanding of charge transfer physics. Finally, you don’t have to build your measurement equipment by yourself, but knowledge of its working principles is essential to distinguish between junk to a real result.

To summarize, nanotechnology is an amazing interdisciplinary field. Although sometimes we are not aware about that, its fruits are everywhere around us, including batteries, displays, electronics, medicine, ecology or any other field you can imagine. It is fascinating to see what universes we are going to explore based on this interdisciplinary field.