Think very small: from nanotubes to quantum dots, nanotechnology presents great opportunities for Indiana.

• Author: Hromadka, Erik
• Position: TECHNOLOGY

IN "THE PLACES THAT nature works," on a scale so small that even standard microscopes can't allow us to see, there's a looming building boom that may change the way we live our everyday lives.

That's the promise of nanotechnology, which is generally defined as new procedures and devices being built at less than 100 nanometers, each being one millionth of a millimeter. While it is difficult to imagine such a size, a DNA molecule has a diameter of about 2.5 nanometers and the diameter of a human hair is roughly 80,000 nanometers.

Although the concept of building at the nano scale has been discussed for decades, it's the possibility of such new products leaving the lab and being used in consumer and industrial products that has many people referring to such science as the next Industrial Revolution. And research being done in Indiana places the state in a promising position to manufacture the nanotubes, nanowires and quantum dots of the future.

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George B. Adams III, associate director for programs at the Network for Computational Nanotechnology and based at Purdue University, says Indiana has great potential to change our understanding of how such materials interact and how they can be used.

"We've only been able to look at this world for the past 25 years and there's a great deal out there we don't know," he says. However, Adams says Purdue is leading the exploration and discovery of this area through efforts like the network, which is a multi-university initiative funded by the National Science Foundation and charged with creating nanoHUB.org, a site where more than 300,000 nanotechnology simulations have taken place in the past year.

"Carbon nanotubes are an amazing new form of carbon," he says, citing examples of how they can be used to construct tiny structures with amazing strength or be grown on surfaces that can convert heat to electricity at high efficiency He says such uses may lead to painless needles that deliver drugs without causing pain or cars that can generate electricity from engine heat.

Other nano building blocks include nanowires that are so small and narrow that they are often called one-dimensional and quantum dots, excited electrons confined in all three spatial dimensions. Such unique properties may redefine the way we build computer circuits.

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However, Adams predicts the first major breakthroughs from nanotechnology will take place in advanced sensors that will be able to...