Nano-Materials and Nano-Technology

Nano, a Greek word , means dwarf. Science has, however, given this dwarf a numerical value of "one billionth". A nanometer is thus one billionth of a meter, or 10A°.As a very general definition , materials/structures with one or more physical dimensions having the size of some nano-meters are now called nano-materials/ nano-structures. The processes utilized to create such materials/structures, and technologies to exploit these to fabricate devices with/ without integration with suitable micro/ macro dimension materials/ structures /devices are termed as nanotechnologies. With increasing use of the word NANO in popular science and consumer applications, sub-micron size materials and devices arealso loosely included in the nano-categories. Nano-materials are low dimensional materials which are classified by physicists as zero, one, or two dimensional, depending on whether three, two, or one dimensions are small enough in size (which is of course relative to the size of the probe entities) so that classical laws of physics are not applicable with confidence. Some typical examples of low dimensional materials and devices are listed in the following