Nanoscience and Nanotechnology: The Key to New Studies in Areas of Science Outside of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
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Nanotechnology: The Key to New Studies in Areas of Science Outside of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Herbert Gleiter
The following article is based on the Von Hippel Award address given by Herbert Gleiter, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Institute for Nanotechnology, Karlsruhe, Germany. Gleiter presented his award talk during the 2008 Materials Research Society Fall Meeting in Boston. He was recognized with MRS’s highest honor, the Von Hippel Award, “for his imaginative experiments on the role of defects that have led to new insights into the importance of length-scale in materials and have resulted in many new applications.” The Von Hippel Award honors those qualities most prized by materials scientists and engineers—exemplified by the life of Arthur von Hippel (http://vonhippel.mrs.org).
Abstract In recent years, a new branch of nanoscience/nanotechnology seems to be emerging. This branch is characterized by the application of preparation methods and/or the diagnostic tools developed in nanoscience/nanotechnology in order to perform either new, decisive experiments or to open the way to novel applications in areas of science that were originally not related to nanoscience/nanotechnology, such as cancer research or quantum physics. In order to highlight the diversity of this new branch, we shall discuss the following four areas in which methods of nanoscience/nanotechnology are applied to other areas of science: (1) cancer therapy, (2) cellular labeling, (3) the synthesis of solid materials with tunable atomic structures, and (4) the new opportunities provided by nanoscience/nanotechnology to probe the limits of quantum physics, one of the classical problems of physics.
Introduction In the past, nanoscience and nanotechnology (NS/NT) have focused primarily on the following two areas: 䊏 the production and understanding of nanometer-sized structured devices 䊏 the synthesis and understanding of materials with nanometer-sized microstructures. 456
Examples of nanometer-structured devices are hard-disk storage devices using the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect. For a comprehensive review, see Reference 1. The most important part of these devices are multilayer films consisting of a sequence of ferromagnetic (e.g.,
Co) and nonferromagnetic (e.g., Au) materials (Figure 1a). The electric resistivity of these films changes significantly if an external magnetic field (e.g., originating from the data stored on a hard disk) is applied (Figure 1b). This resistivity variation results from a combination of two effects. The first one is that the resistance of the multilayer varies considerably if the configuration is switched from parallel (P) to antiparallel (AP). This effect arises as a consequence of the spin-dependent scattering of electrons in ferromagnetic layers. The second effect is the antiferromagnetic interlayer exchange coupling that leads to an antiparallel orientation of the magnetizations of successive ferromagnetic layers in the absence of an external field. This effect allows one (by applying an external mag
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