NSF Nanoscience Symposium
By lani 20 Mar 2002
Yesterday the NSF sponsored a symposium on Nanoscience mostly featuring leading scientists from their six newly funded nanoscience centers, which are located at Northwestern, Harvard, Cornell, Rice, Columbia, and RPI. It was more of a showcase of what these scientists have been doing and why NSF should keep funding them, but I got to see a lot of cute demos and animations. Including a prototype cellphone and DVD player with OLED displays (I could make out shapes on the DVD player from across the auditorium!).
<p>Since it was not just scientist targetted symposium, I did get to see a few presentations and panel discussions on the social and economic impact of nanoscience. Although most of it could have been classified under the “we’re doing this because <span class="caps">NSF</span> is making us” genre, there were some interesting insights. Herb Goronkin of Motorola (who plainly stated that their research is not funded by <span class="caps">NSF</span>) identified several of the risk factors that they have considered in their nanoscience research, two of which included that quantum behavior will require probabilistic circuit design approaches and that power consumption of nanodevices may be nonlinear. However, the advantages of nanodevices (which are enough that Motorola is still investing R&D) were reviewed in various presentations. Ralph Calvin used a statistic (to which he admits some skepticism) that an <span class="caps">NEC</span> executive presented which stated that at the rate that consumer use of electronic devices…and don’t think that miniaturization will help…Japan will have to build 30 new nuclear reactors. A <a href="http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresearch.nsf/pages/cmos398.html">paper by Philip Wong</a> of <span class="caps">IBM</span> was also referenced on what <span class="caps">CMOS</span> can’t do.</p>
<p>Some of the more fun science presented included that of Eigler who is famous for being able to <a href="http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/atomo.html">move atoms controllably</a> using an <span class="caps">STM</span> tip (Scanning Tunneling Microscopy), and was also referred to as an expert in nanopolitics by Eric Heller because the first thing he wrote was “<span class="caps">IBM</span>”.</p>
<p>They’ve developed a lot of fun media tools to make the moguls happy, including an animation of flying through an <a href="http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/stm.html#fly-by">atomic landscape</a>. He also did a demo of a teaching tool that he has developed where you can move atoms from a remote computer. (Sorry, didn’t get the password on that one.) Eigler does some theoretically interesting work that “mimicks” on an atomic level what the Weber brothers (had trouble finding picture) by building atomic corrals which are shaped in circles, ellipses, etc. and various atoms at different points and “imaging” the mirage of wave patterns that occur with one or two or four atoms.</p>
<p>Another impressive presenter was Angela Belcher who does <a href="http://txtell.lib.utexas.edu/stories/b0006-full.html">biocomposite research</a> at U of Texax. She demo’d a clear film made of viruses engineered to grow inorganic quantum dots to exploit the viruses natural organizational properties for materials. These engineered viruses exhibited three different types of liquid crystal behavior (smectic, nematic, and cholesteric). </p>
<p>And the great part about <span class="caps">NSF</span> funding for people like me is that to satisfy the community outreach requirement, Purdue has put together <a href="http://www.nanohub.purdue.edu/NanoHub/HubInfo/resources.html#courses">NanoHub</a>. This includes some tutorials and links. Including one to the Center for Quantum Computation, which has a section on <a href="http://www.qubit.org/intros/cryptana.html">quantum cryptoanalysis</a>. </p>
<p>“Those who control materials control technology.”</p>
—Eiji Kobayashi, Panasonic