To understand nanotechnology it is of vital importance to understand the nanoscale and what makes it unique from other metric scales. Nanotechnology works on the nanoscale, which is the range of 1 nanometer to 100 nanometers. A Nanometer is a metric prefix and indicates a billionth of a part (10^-9). There are one billion nanometers in a meter.
Let’s put this in context. A tennis ball is about 70 million nanometers, a pencil period about a million, a cancer cell about a ten thousand, and a virus about a hundred. It is difficult to even imagine much less comprehend how truly small that is. But try.
Transitional pROPERTIES
Materials in this really small-scale show different properties compared to what they exhibit in the macroscale (bigger than 100nm) or the atomic scale (less than 1 nm). It is an intermediate scale, in which there is a transition between bulk and molecular behaviors, Newtonian and quantum physics.
What works in one scale does not necessarily work on the other, as size changes material’s properties, (conductivity, color, strength, etc). For example, the malleable color of gold on the nanoscale. This particular phenomenon is better noted in gold quantum dots. Quantum dot nanocrystals of the same material, in this case gold, with different sizes when placed in a solution emit light of different colors. Smaller dots emit bluer light, while larger dots emit redder light, basically following the fluorescence light spectrum. Still these different properties do not explain why nanodevices are expected to be extremely powerful compared to bulk devices. One can better understand this through a simplistic approach called scaling laws. Check these out on the next webpage!!!