CC BY
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UDC 378.147.809
G. G. Amirova
HISTORY OF NANOTECHNOLOGY: CONCEPTS AND SCIENTISTS
Keywords: nanoscience and nanotechnology, fundamental principles of molecular design, self-replicating, mechanosynthesis, quantum cascade lasers, molecular beam epitaxy, carbon nanotubes, nanoelectromechanical systems, spintronics, nanodevice.
Nanotechnology, in its traditional sense, means the construction of the object from the bottom up, with atomic precision. This theoretical possibility was conceived in 1959 and over the next decades, has led to a new paradigm of development of science, technology, social life. Currently, nanotechnology involves a group of new technologies, in which the structure of matter is controlled at the nanometer scale. The article analyzes the historical development of nanoscience with the reference to the contribution offamous foreign scientists and scientific schools to nanoscience.
Ключевые слова: нанонаука, нанотехнология, основные принципы молекулярного конструирования, самовоспроизводящиеся, механосинтез, квантовые каскадные лазеры, молекулярно-лучевая эпитаксия, углеродные нанотрубки, наноэлектромехани-
ческие системы, спинтроника, наноустройство.
Нанотехнология, в ее традиционном смысле, означает конструированиепредмета снизу вверх, с атомной точностью. Эта теоретическая возможность была задумана еще в 1959 году и на протяжении последующих десятилетий приводит к формированию новой парадигмы развития науки, технологии, социальной жизни общества. В настоящее время, нанотехнология включает группу новых технологий, в которых структура материи контролируется в нанометровом масштабе. В статье анализируются основные вехи исторического развития со ссылками на внесенный вклад в нанонауку известных зарубежных ученых и научных школ.
Early history of nanoscience and nanotechnology begins in mid-fifties of the last century, with Richard Feynman (1918-1988), K. Eric Drexler, Richard Smalley (1943-2005) being known as the founders of a new science.
Nanotechnology, in its traditional sense, means building things from the bottom up, with atomic precision. This theoretical capability was envisioned as early as 1959 by the renowned physicist Richard Feynman. His speech "There's plenty of room at the bottom: An invitation to enter a new field of physics" was first presented at California Institute of Technology on December 29, 1959. His ideas were based on the three obvious facts: 1) Biology shows molecular machines; 2) Chemistry makes diverse molecules; 3) Engineering builds systems from parts.
Richard Feynman asserted that miniaturization as a new field of research is the field in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle.
There are some major ideas formulated by Richard Feynman:
- The tiniest cells of marvelous biological systems contain all information for the organization of a complex creature such as ourselves.
- All this information is contained in a very tiny fraction of the cell in the form of long-chain DNA molecules in which approximately 50 atoms are used for one bit of information about the cell.
- Biology is not simply writing information; it is doing something about it.
- We also can make a very small thing that does what we want. We can manufacture an object that maneuvers at that level.
The term "nanotechnology" was popularized in the 1980's by Dr. Kim Eric Drexler (born April 25, 1955 in Alameda, California) who was one time the student of Richard Feynman. His 1981 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences established funda-
mental principles of molecular design, protein engineering, and productive nanosystems. He was talking about building machines on the scale of molecules, a few nanometers size motors, robot arms, and even whole computers, far smaller than a cell. Drexler spent ten years describing and analyzing these incredible devices, and responding to accusations of being science fiction writer.
Meanwhile, the chemical technology was developing the ability to build simple structures on a molecular scale. As nanotechnology became an accepted concept, the meaning of the word shifted to encompass the simpler kinds of nanometer-scale technology. The U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative was created to fund this kind of nanotech: their definition includes anything smaller than 100 nanometers with novel properties. Directly after the publication of this book, Drexler founded the Foresight Institute, whose stated goal is to "ensure the beneficial implementation of nanotechnology [4]."
Drexler used this "institute" as a way to present his vision of molecular manufacturing that he vividly illustrated in Engines of Creation. Thus, this "institute" was used to further propagate research, through his influential yet highly controversial depiction of nanotech-nology and its future. He is currently working in a collaboration with the World Wide Fund to explore nano-technology-based solutions to global problems such as energy and climate change. Drexler was awarded a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Molecular Nanotechnology (the first degree in Nanosystems). Dr. Drexler serves as Chief Technical Advisor to Nanorexa company developing open-source design software for structural DNA nanotechnologies. He consults and speaks on how current research can be directed more effectively toward high-payoff objectives, and addresses the implications of emerging technologies for our future, including their use to solve, rather than delay, large-scale problems such as global warming.
As an example, we present here the concept of Drexler's Dream Factory:
The Theory. In Drexler's conception, the goal of nano-technology is to build molecular assemblers - nanoscale factories capable of constructing objects at any scale, atom by atom. Unlike conventional chemistry, in which innumerable molecules interact, Drexler has proposed a method of "mechanosynthesis" which involves positioning individual molecules close together so stronger chemical attractions can overcome weaker ones in a controlled way, depositing or removing atoms as desired.
The Technology. In this image of a hypothetical molecular mill, a conveyor belt carries the production line beneath an assembly wheel outfitted with tool tips of reactive germanium - exchangeable with alternative tips to deposit or remove different types of atoms. The mechanism places a single hydrogen atom on each molecule as it passes. As Drexler sees it, a system of such machines would be able to build just about anything, quickly and inexpensively.
The Problem. In practice, Drexler's critics say that chemistry is more complicated. Each atom in a molecule interacts with every other atom nearby, including those in the proposed tool tips, conveyor belt, mill wheel, and so on. Thus, to deposit a single atom, a nanoassembler would need to restrain every atom in the vicinity. The sheer number of atoms that would need to be controlled, and the machinery it would take to control them, make Drexler's mechanosynthesis practically impossible. But who knows?
Some scientists have criticized Drexler's visions as impossible and harmful. Richard Smalley has led this movement against Drexler's almost sensationalist vision of molecular manufacturing. In their open debate in 2003, Smalley writes almost sarcastically, "you cannot make precise chemistry occur as desired between two molecular objects with simple mechanical motion along a few degrees of freedom in the assembler-fixed frame of reference" [4, 7 - 9]. Furthermore, he also chastises Drexler saying, "you and the people around you have scared our children while our future in the real world will be challenging though there are real risks, but there will be no such monster as the self-replicating mechanical nanorobot of your dreams."
Due to the publicity generated by both Drexler's work and the Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), scientists from all over the world began to have an interest in the field of nanotechnology. Dr. Richard Smalley (1943-2005), for example, specifically said that he was a "fan of Eric" and that Drexler's work influenced him to pursue nanotechnology. Moreover, he even referred to Drexler's book as the top decision-maker. Though criticizing Drexler and his work in future years, Smalley, like other scientists, were intrigued by this book and proceeded to do research in this new and evolving field. Drexler's vision of molecular manufacturing and assemblers has become, on one hand, a scientific goal, through the Foresight Institute, and, on the other, a controversial issue.
In contrast to Drexler's radical vision, Smalley realistically argued that nanotechnology could be used on a much more practical and attainable level. As a re-
sult, due to the onset of academic criticism from scientists such as Richard Smalley, nanotechnology evolved from Drexler's vision of molecular manufacturing to a broad field that encompassed both practical manufacturing and non-manufacturing activities. Chemistry, materials science, and molecular engineering were now all included in this science.
Alfred Yi Cho (Chinese, born July 10, 1937) is the Adjunct Vice President of Semiconductor Research at Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs. He is known as the "father of molecular beam epitaxy"; a technique he developed at that facility in the late 1960s. He is also the coinventor, with Federico Capasso of quantum cascade lasers at Bell Labs in 1994.
Cho was born in Beijing. He went to Hong Kong in 1949 and had his secondary education in Pui Ching Middle School there. Cho holds B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. He joined Bell Labs in 1968. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In June 2007 he was honored with the U.S. National Medal of Technology, the highest honor awarded by the President of the United States for technological innovation. Cho received the award for his contributions to the invention of molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and his work to commercialize the process.
He already has many awards to his name, including: the American Physical Society International Prize for New Materials in 1982, the Solid State Science and Technology Medal of the Electrochemical Society in 1987, the World Materials Congress Award of ASM International in 1988, the Gaede-Langmuir Award of the American Vacuum Society in 1988, the Industrial Research Institute Achievement Award of the Industrial Research Institute Inc in 1988, the New Jersey Governor's Thomas Alva Edison Science Award in 1990, the International Crystal Growth Award of the American Association for Crystal Growth in 1990, the National Medal of Science in 1993, the Von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society in 1994, the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1995, the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1994, and the Computers & Communications Prize of the C&C Foundation, Japan in 1995.In 2009, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
In 1985, Bell Labs became the first organization to be honored with a U.S. Medal of Technology, awarded for "contributions over decades to modern communications systems." Cho's honor marks the eighth time Bell Labs and its scientists have received the award.
Sumio Iijima (Iijima Sumio, born May 2, 1939) is a Japanese physicist, often cited as the discoverer of carbon nanotubes. Although carbon nanotubes had been observed prior to his "discovery", Iijima's 1991 paper generated unprecedented interest in the carbon nanostructures and has since fueled intense research in the area of nanotechnology [5]. For this and other work
Sumio Iijima was awarded, together with Louis Brus, the inaugural Kavli Prize for Nanoscience in 2008.
Born in Saitama Prefecture in 1939, Iijima graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in 1963 from the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo. He received a Master's degree in 1965 and completed his Ph.D. in solid-state physics in 1968, both at Tohoku University in Sendai.
Between 1970 and 1982 he performed research with crystalline materials and high-resolution electron microscopy at Arizona State University. He visited the University of Cambridge during 1979 to perform studies on carbon materials.
He worked for the Research Development Corporation of Japan from 1982 to 1987, studying ultra-fine particles, after which he joined NEC Corporation where he is still employed. He discovered carbon nanotubes in 1991 while working with NEC. He is also a professor at Meijo University since 1999. Furthermore, he is the director of the Research Center for Advanced Carbon Materials, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Distinguished Invited University Professor of Nagoya University and the dean of SKKU Advanced Institute of Nanotechnology (SAINT).
He was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics in 2002, "for the discovery and elucidation of the atomic structure and helical character of multi-wall and single-wall carbon nanotubes, which have had an enormous impact on the rapidly growing condensed matter and materials science field of nanoscale science and electronics."
He is a Foreign Associate of National Academy of Sciences, Foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Also, He is a Member of The Japan Academy.
The major milestones in nanotechnology are considered to be as follows:
1959 - Feynman 's talk on the prospects of miniaturization. His speech "There's plenty of room at the bottom: An invitation to enter a new field of physics" was first presented at California Institute of Technology on December 29, 1959.
1968 - Alfred Cho and John Arturo invented molecular beam epitaxy, a technique to deposit single atomic layer on a surface. The Molecular Beam Epitaxy System in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory is used to grow and characterize thin crystalline films of oxides and ceramics to understand in detail the chemistry that occurs on oxides and ceramic surfaces.
1981 - Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer created the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) which can image single atoms [1]. Nobel Prize for physics in 1986. The STM is an electron microscope that uses a single atom tip to attain atomic resolution. Tungsten is commonly used because electro-chemical etching can be applied to create very sharp tips.
1985 - Robert Curl, Harold Kroto and Richard Smally discovered discovered bukyballs which are about 1 nm in diameter [2]. It was not until 1991 that buckyball science came into its own. Spherical buckyballs literally add a new dimension to the chemistry of aromatic compounds. Buckminsterfullerene has
been named the Molecule of the Year. In addition to opening up new fields on chemistry, C60 also shows interesting physical properties. It is resistant to shock and it has been suggested that as a lubricant, there is even evidence of superconductivity and it may provide the added ingredient that makes diamond films more practical.
1986 - K. Eric Drexler published "Engines of Creation", a futuristic book about nanotech [4]. The book features nanotechnology, which Richard Feynman had discussed in his 1959 speech "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom". Drexler imagines a world where the entire Library of Congress can fit on a chip the size of a sugar cube and where universal assemblers, tiny machines that can build objects atom by atom, will be used for everything from medicinal robots that help clear capillaries to environmental scrubbers that clear pollutants from the air. In the book, Drexler first proposes the gray goo scenario—his prediction of what might happen if molecular nanotechnology were used to build uncontrollable self-replicating machines.
1989 - Donald Eigler of IBM wrote letters "IBM" using single atoms. On September 28, 1989 he achieved a landmark in humankind's ability to build small structures by demonstrating the ability to manipulate individual atoms with atomic-scale precision [3].
1991 - Sumio Iijima of NEC Japan discovered carbon nanotubes. On 7 November 1991, Sumio Iijima announced in Nature the preparation of nanometer-size, needle-like tubes of carbon — now familiar as 'nanotubes'. Used in microelectronic circuitry and microscopy, and as a tool to test quantum mechanics and model biological systems, nanotubes seem to have unlimited potential [5].
1998 - creation of a transistor from carbon nanotube at Delft University in Netherlands. A carbon nanotube field-effect transistor (CNTFET) refers to a field-effect transistor that utilizes a single carbon nano-tube or an array of carbon nanotubes as the channel material instead of bulk silicon in the traditional structure. It is a promise for an alternative material to replace silicon in future electronics.
1999 - James Tour and Mark Reed demonstrated that single molecules can act as switches [6]. We propose a stable molecular electronic switch design which contains a double-benzene molecule bridging a pair of CNT electrodes. The effect of different coupling between the molecule and electrodes on the switch function of the system is studied by use of tight-binding Green function approach. The system keeps a stable switch function for a large range of the coupling distance, as long as the ^coupling between the molecule and the CNT remains.
2000 - Eigler and others devised a quantum mirage - placing a magnetic atom at the focus of an elliptical ring of atoms creates a mirage atom at the other focus. The results of Donald Eigler's group include the invention of quantum corrals, discovery of the quantum mirage effect, demonstration of a fundamentally new way to transport information through solid utilizing modulated quantum states, the demonstration of nanometer-scale logic circuits based on molecular cascades, and invention of spin excitation spectroscopy [3].
Most recently, milestones made by the researchers in Eigler's historic lab include the ability to measure the magnetic properties of individual atoms and the ability to measure the force it takes to move individual atoms.
Donald M. Eigler is an American physicist associated with the IBM Almaden Research Center, who is noted for his achievements in nanotechnology. In 1989, he was the first to use a scanning tunneling microscope tip to arrange individual atoms on a surface, famously spelling out the letters "IBM" with 35 xenon atoms. He later went on to create the first quantum corrals, which are well-defined quantum wave patterns of small numbers of atoms, and nanoscale logic circuits using individual atoms of carbon monoxide. Eigler's 1989 research, along withErhard K. Schwetzer, involved a new use of the scanning tunneling microscope, which had been invented in the mid 1980s by Gerd Binning and Heinrich Rohrer, also of IBM. The microscope had previously been used for atomic-resolution imaging, but this was the first time it had been used as an active technique, to precisely position individual atoms on a surface. The technique requires vacuum conditions and ultra-cold temperatures achieved by liquid heliumcooling, and were featured on the cover of the journal Nature. At the time, it was seen as a potential first step towards applications in mechanosynthesis.
Michael Lee Roukes is an American experimental physicist, nanoscientist. After earning B.A. degrees in physics and chemistry (double majors) in 1978 at University of California, Santa Cruz, with highest honors in both majors, he received his Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University in 1985. His graduate advisor at Cornell was Nobel Laureate, Robert Coleman Richardson. Roukes' thesis research at Cornell elucidated the electron-photon bottleneck at ultra low temperatures; the hot electron effect that is now recapitulated in texts on solid state transport physics.
Among his and his groups' principal achievements at Caltech are development of the first nanoelectromechanical systems, measurement of the quantum of thermal conductance, first attainment of attogram mass resolution with a NEMS resonator, first measurement of nanodevice motion at microwave fre-
quencies, discovery of the giant planar Hall effect in semiconducting ferromagnets, observation and control of a single domain wall in a ferromagnetic semiconducting wire, first demonstration of zeptogram-scale mass sensing, first coupling of a qubit to a NEMS resonator, and first demonstration of nanomechanical mass spectrometry of single protein molecules. Roukes has authored or co-authored highly cited general interest articles on nanophysics, nanoelectromechanical systems,
spintronics, and quantum electromechanics.
Nanotechnology is a group of emerging technologies in which the structure of matter is controlled at the nanometer scale, the scale of small numbers of atoms, to produce and devices that have useful and unique properties. Some of these technologies impose only limited control of structure at the nanometer scale, but they are already in use, producing useful products. They are also being further developed to produce even more products in which the structure of matter is more precisely controlled [7 - 9].
Literature
1. G. Binnig, H. Rohrer, C. Gerber, E. Weibel. Physical Review Letters, 49, 1, 57-61 (1982)
2. R. Curl, Reviews of Modern Physics 69 (3), 691-702 (1997)
3. Don Eigler, IEEE Global History Network. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, N.Y., 2012. 342 p.
4. K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. Updated and Expanded. WOWIO Books, 2007. 646 p.
5. Sumio Iijima, Nature, 354, 56-58 (1991)
6. J.M. Tour, Nature Materials, 2014. [Электронный ресурс] - Режим доступа: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat3961
7. Г.Г. Амирова, И.Х. Зиганшин, Вестник Казанского технол. университета, 14, 15, 272-276 (2011)
8. Э.М. Муртазина, Вестник Казанского технол. университета, 9, 728-732 (2010)
9. Э.М. Муртазина, Г.Г. Амирова, Вестник Казанского технологического университета, 16, 9, 336-342 (2013)
© G. G. Amirova - Ph.D. in Pedagogy, Assoc. Professor, the Department of Foreign Languages for Professional Communication, KNRTU, [email protected].
© Г. Г. Амирова - к.пед.н., доцент каф. ИЯПК КНИТУ, [email protected].
