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Nanomaterials are an enabling component of the popularly labeled area of "nanotechnology, " but are generally not well understood in the materials community at large. The purpose of this article is to narrow this gap by framing nanomaterials in the traditional materials science and engineering context as well as discussing some potential implications to the materials enterprise.
INTRODUCTION
To understand and discuss nanomaterials, it is perhaps best to start with the broad area that is known as nanotechnology. Identification of the concept of nanotechnology has been attributed to Richard Feynman, who presented a speech in 1959 titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." In his speech, Feynman described manipulating atoms to make materials many decades before it became possible to do so.1 The term "nanotechnology" was not used until 1974 by Taniguchi at the University of Tokyo, Japan, to refer to the ability to engineer materials precisely at the nanometer level, driven by electronics industry needs.2 In 1981, the advent of the scanning tunneling microscope enabled atom clusters to be seen, while in 1991 IBM demonstrated the ability to arrange individual xenon atoms using an atomic force instrument.
What is nanotechnology? A variety of definitions for nanotechnology have been presented. By the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) standards, nanotechnology involves all of the following:
* Research and technology development at the atomic, molecular, or macromolecular levels, approximately 1 -100 nanometers in length.
* Creation and use of structures, devices, and systems that have novel properties and functions because of their small and/or intermediate size.
* Ability to control or manipulate on the atomic scale.
The Royal Society and The Royal Academy of Engineering define nanotechnologies as the design, characterization, production, and application of structures, devices, and systems by controlling shape and size at the nanometer scale.3 Note the use of the plural due to the large number of tools, techniques, and potential applications involved. Others have more prosaic descriptions that perhaps lack definitional precision but provide insight. As Gary Stix described nanotechnology in Scientific American, "The field is a vast grab bag of stuff that has to do with creating tiny things that sometimes just happen to be useful. It borrows liberally from condensed-matter physics, engineering, molecular biology and large swaths of chemistry."4