Nanotechnology future

Carbon with its wide range of sp bond hybridisation appears as the key element of a future nanotechnology. However, so far there is almost no control over the formation processes, and the structures of interest cannot be built at will. Tubes, for example, are produced under the very virulent conditions of a plasma discharge and one would like to have more elegant tools to manipulate the carbon structures, a task which remains a challenge for the future. 

K. E. Drexler, C. Peterson, and G. Pergamit, Unbounding the Future, The Nanotechnology Revolution, William Morrow Co., New York, 1991. 

The fact that relatively few commercial processes currently utilize dehydrogenases, in spite of the high level of interest at the research and bench scales, argues that progress is needed in this area before these enzymes can be considered to be a normal part of chemical synthesis. Many of these advances will come by partnerships with genomics, nanotechnology and computational approaches. In the discovery area, key questions for the future are ... 

The unique power of synthesis is the ability to create new molecules and materials with valuable properties. This capacity can be used to interact with the natural world, as in the treatment of disease or the production of food, but it can also produce compounds and materials beyond the capacity of living systems. Our present world uses vast amounts of synthetic polymers, mainly derived from petroleum by synthesis. The development of nanotechnology, which envisions the application of properties at the molecular level to catalysis, energy transfer, and information management has focused attention on multimolecular arrays and systems capable of self-assembly. We can expect that in the future synthesis will bring into existence new substances with unique properties that will have impacts as profound as those resulting from syntheses of therapeutics and polymeric materials. 

G. Patzke, F. Krumeich, R. Nesper, Oxidic nanotubes and nanorods - anisotropic modules for a future nanotechnology. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed, 41 (2002) 2462. 

One of the major breakthroughs in nanotechnology is the use of nanomaterials as catalysts for environmental applications [149]. Nanomaterials have been developed to improve the properties of catalysts, enhance reactivity towards pollutants, and improve their mobility in various environmental media [150]. Nanomaterials offer applications to pollution prevention through improved catalytic processes that reduce the use of toxic chemicals and eliminate wastes. Nanomaterials also offer applications in environmental remediation and, in the near future, opportunities to create better sensors for process controls. 

There is a very bright future for these electronically well-defined NW building blocks both in fundamental science and in new nanotechnologies. Specifically, we believe that only the very edge of a broad range of ideas has been touched on and that many fascinating fundamental problems remain in these... 

J. Saxton, Nanotechnology The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think, Joint Economic Committee, US Congress, Washington, DC, 2007. 

Finally some future trends will be outlined in order to predict possible applications derived from today s micro and nanotechnology developments. 

Anonymous. Announcement for the Nara Institute of Science and Technology International Symposium Nanotechnology and biotechnology for future devices. Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara, Japan, 1998. 

The Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman described, in a lecture delivered in 1959, the future of miniaturization. The published version of his lecture is called There s Plenty of Room at the Bottom and in it can be found a recipe for putting the entire Encyclopedia Britan-nica on the very small head of a very small pin. Feynman s comments set into motion an entirely new area of study and have lead to what have become known as the fields of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Chemists, physicists, materials scientists, and engineers have come together over the past several decades to produce with high accuracy and precision materials that have dimensions measured in nanometers (nm, 10 meters, about 1/100 000 the width of a human hair). Specifically, materials with one, two, or three dimensions of 100 nm or less (called, respectively, nanofilms, nanotubes, and nanoparticles) qualify as products of nanotechnology. It appears that almost any chemical substance that is a solid under ordinary conditions of temperature... 

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