Author
Wolfgang S. Bacsa , Ph.D., Professor at the Solid State Physics Laboratory at the Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France. Wolfgang Bacsa has a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)...
What is Nanoscience? What can we learn?
2 Feb, 2006 01:06 pm
Today, the growing needs of the semiconductor industry have paved the way for fantastic progress in lithography to define structures at smaller and smaller scales. Simultaneously, while conventional lithography tools run into more and more fundamental limitations there has been an enormous increase
in interest to look at alternative bottom-up approaches such as self-assembly to define structures at the nanometer scale. The convergence of applied and fundamental science coupled with the technological advancement in the semiconductor industry fundamentally changes the research landscape and how technology is viewed today. What are the consequences of this new situation?
Self-assembly is the single major driving force in biology whereby macromolecules are produced, organized, their functionalities determined; in other words, self assembly make life possible. Over the years we have been extending our efforts to control and organise matter at smaller and smaller scales as a result of which fundamental research and technological progress in industry have begun to overlap. In the past, applied sciences have progressed in controlling and defining matter at smaller and smaller scales while fundamental sciences have advanced in being able to describe increasingly larger and more complex situations accurately. This convergence of applied and fundamental science coupled with the technological advancement in the semiconductor industry fundamentally changes the research landscape and how technology is viewed today. These issues are probably the most important driving forces behind the discipline that we call nanoscience.
The consequence of this new situation where advanced technology, applied and fundamental research work on the same scale is the overlap between different disciplines that now brings not only different scientific disciplines but also engineers into the field. The potential interactions are multiple between physics, chemistry, biology, engineering and medicine. But will collaboration between different disciplines work? At first sight it is not clear why it should not. However, in practice, the fact that education and work environment can differ considerably between disciplines indicates that although interdisciplinary projects are highly favoured today, the difficulty one might run into in actually carrying them out may be strongly underestimated. Is this one of the lessons learned from nanotechnology research? Research at the nanometer scale means working between different disciplines. But working between disciplines means that we need to know more about other research disciplines in order to make any collaboration successful.
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