Toward Applications of Ceramic Nanostructures
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Toward Applications of Ceramic Nanostructures
Sudipta Seal and Marie-Isabelle Baraton, Guest Editors Abstract This article serves to introduce the January 2004 issue of MRS Bulletin on progress toward applications of ceramic nanostructures. Conventional ceramic materials are widely used today in areas ranging from structural to biological applications, and in devices as diverse as lasers, semiconductors, sensors, and piezoelectric components. Such materials include oxides, carbides, nitrides, mixed oxides, and composites. Over the last decade, the use of ceramic nanostructures has already changed the approach to materials design in many of these applications, by seeking structural control at the atomic level and tailoring of the engineering properties. The articles in this issue review the advantages of nanoceramics, their application in various fields, and the challenges involved in their fabrication. Keywords: bioceramics, consolidation, nanoceramics, nanocomposites, nanostructure, nanotubes, photovoltaics, semiconductors.
Materials scientists today are being challenged to discover, build, control, and test structures whose dimensions range in the nanometer scale and to demonstrate the potential of these nanostructures in scientific, industrial, or medical applications while keeping in mind their potential impact on society. The resulting so-called nanotechnology, which implies the control of matter at the atomic and molecular level, is requiring researchers to work across not only the boundaries of classical scientific disciplines, but also those of other fields, including the social sciences and education.1,2 Figure 1 gives a basic scheme of the interdisciplinary character of nanotechnology by showing the overlaps between the science of nanotechnology and various application fields. As often happens in the early stages of a promising new technology, strong hopes have been placed on nanomaterials to solve all the current problems in many scientific fields, from electronics, optoelectronics, and photonics to energy storage, medicine, and biology. It is indeed true that many nanoscale approaches that have been proposed can in principle provide solutions to difficult scientific problems; successful MRS BULLETIN/JANUARY 2004
demonstrations of this have been made in laboratories throughout the world (see References 3–9 for examples). Some applications that have already benefited from
nanomaterials and nanotechnology are mentioned in Figure 1. However, a delicate point to address is that the integration of nanotechnology in current industrial processes remains a challenge. Gaining an understanding of and, ultimately, control over the properties and behavior of a wide range of materials at the nanoscale is now a major theme in materials research. The properties of the resulting products and devices ultimately depend on how the atoms are arranged in the material. For example, atoms in coal can be rearranged to make diamond; atoms in sand can be manipulated (with the addition of a few other trace elements) to make co
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