Nanotechnology is a new era of technological discovery that has the potential to enable critical new inventions in a wide variety of fields including microelectronics, manufacturing, information technology, healthcare, biotechnology, energy, and materials science. The study of nanoscale objects is not just another step towards miniaturization but leads to unprecedented understanding and control over the fundamental building blocks of nature and materials. New developments in nanotechnology are likely to change how all materials are processed.

Dimensionality plays a central role in determining the physical properties of materials. Electron interactions, for example, differ in three-dimensional bulk solids from those in two-dimensional (2D) and one-dimensional (1D) systems. These differences can often lead to new phenomena. As technology rapidly shrinks toward the nanometer length-scale, understanding how dimensionality affects the electronic properties of semiconductors and metals has become technologically relevant. Material dimensions will restrict electron interactions resulting in an overall loss of energy level degeneracy in the electronic structure. These quantum confinement effects will lead to new electronic and optical properties, such as size-tunable excitation and luminescence energies. These new material properties might be exploited in a variety of new technologies including electronic, optical, medical, coatings, catalytic, memory, and sensor applications.

Nanowires One dimensional (1D) structures, or nanowires, are expected to play a role in future integrated circuits as both devices and interconnects. One of the most successful approaches for producing nanowires is based on the vapor -liquid-solid (VLS) growth process described nearly 40 years ago by Wagner and Ellis. Several researchers have used...[More]

Materials Properties/Devices Construction of miniaturized integrated circuits via traditional methods, such as organometallic chemical vapor deposition (OMCVD) and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), relies on the ability to grow or etch components within a lithographically defined region. However, the exponential advances in device integration observed over the past several decades...[More]