A half-century ago, the late physicist Richard Feynman decided that science and technology needed to get small in order to be big, so he offered $1,000—the price of a good used car at the time—for the first working motor less than one sixty-fourth of an inch long. It took some months, but a colleague finally did it, using sharpened toothpicks to push together minuscule gears and flywheels, creating a device so tiny that Feynman was happy to pay up.
Which makes you wonder how much Feynman would have paid to see the devices that associate professor of organic chemistry Glen Miller is trying to build, using components so small that 1,000 would barely equal the width of a human hair.
It's not a simple task. "It's not just the size that's different, but the behavior is so different, too," says Miller. Nanoscale particles can take on behavior best described by quantum mechanics, he says, referring to the strange and even paradoxical idiosyncrasies of particles at the atomic level. "We can't manufacture things at this scale the way we assemble cars. It requires self-assembly," he adds, sitting in his office in Parsons Hall and leafing through computer-simulated pictures of devices a nanometer—one billionth of a meter—long. "It's a whole different way to do manufacturing," he says.
"A whole different way to do things" could be the motto of a loose group of more than a dozen researchers who are moving UNH into nanotechnology, an area so new that nobody's quite sure what it encompasses, and so exciting that it's cropping up in places like "Spider-Man 2," where evil Doctor Octopus gets his powers partly through the use of nanowires.
"Genomics and biotechnology are new but quite well defined. But nanotechnology is a mixed bag of lots of things; nobody's really able to give one single definition," says chemist Jerome Claverie, a research associate professor in the Materials Science Program.
Claverie is part of the "Nano Group" at UNH because his Polymer Nanoparticle Laboratory is taking a variety of polymerization techniques—chemical reactions in which one or more small molecules combine to form larger molecules—and applying them at the nano level.
"We talk about it all the time—how exciting it is that we are coming in and doing this research in such a cool and exciting field," says Garnsey. "We don't think, 'Maybe we're going to make a nanotube today.' We think, 'This is something that will become important and we're in at the start.'"
Interest has even spread outside the physical sciences—the Nano Group includes several economists and business specialists who are studying the rise of this potentially revolutionary technology in hopes of helping industry use it.
"Right now, we're hoping to get in on the ground floor of tracking and anticipating its development and its effect on industry and the economy," says Christine Shea, associate professor of operations management.
"A few years ago, people hadn't even heard the word 'nanotechnology,'" says Shea. "It's useful to look at it as a general purpose technology—sort of like electricity or the semiconductor. It's difficult to make generalizations about its overall effect, but in its applications the effect could range from incremental to radical."
There's a lot of nanoscale research going on at UNH, but things really got kicked up a notch this summer when the National Science Foundation rewarded UNH's ongoing collaboration with UMass-Lowell and Northeastern University by giving the trio a five-year, $12.4 million grant to create the Center for High-Rate Nanomanufacturing.
The grant puts UNH in a position to become prominent in the field, says Miller. "We've created a new paradigm by putting the strengths of each institution together. It's a pretty potent package. And I think this is the first multi-university center where all the schools are equal partners."
The general model for the center is that UNH will concentrate on the basic science—the chemistry, physics and materials engineering needed to manipulate molecules to create Feynman-pleasing devices—while Lowell will emphasize high-speed manufacturing processes, and Northeastern will take the lead in reliability testing and modeling.
The duties will overlap extensively, however, and all three will also be studying the societal impact of nanotechnology and handling outreach to public schools as well as the Boston Museum of Science.
The center has two goals. One is to create working devices, including a nanotube memory chip that will—scientists hope—have substantially higher density, and therefore more memory, than existing silicon chips. The researchers are collaborating with the high-tech Massachusetts firm Nantero on the chip project and with New England-based Triton Systems on the development of another device, a nanosized biosensor. The biosensor will, in theory, be able to spot disease at an early stage by using immobilized antibodies to detect specific disease-related antigens.
His lab's goals include creating fire- retardant nanocapsules that can be incorporated into flammable materials without altering desirable properties, and biopolymer nanoparticles built like minuscule cages around medical molecules, controlling the time of their release or allowing them to target specific cells.
Thomas Laue, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, is part of the group because his lab, the Center to Advance Molecular Interaction Science, tackles basic questions vital to the field.
Laue and his colleagues are working to determine the properties of macromolecules, the huge (by nano standards, anyway) conglomeration of particles that will be part of the nanomachines of the future, and to use them to create structure, stability and even self-assembly for such machines.
Associated with many of the labs and projects are undergraduates who view the research as a chance to get hands-on experience in an emerging field.
Michelle Garnsey, a sophomore from Phoenix, Ariz., and Lindsey Silva, a junior from Nashua, N.H., worked for Miller this past summer, trying to synthesize a molecule that has never existed before. It will help create a circular array of benzene rings, which in turn can be stacked together to create a "nanotube" that can lead to nanosized wires and electrical devices.
Creating such devices means not just figuring out how to make them work but also how to mass produce them: One little tiny chip is science; a billion is industry. But in nanomanufacturing, you can't just set up an assembly line. Making use of atomic-level forces to create self-assembly is essential, since properly designed molecular pieces will attract each other. It's as if Ford could build a bunch of car bodies and then have bumpers, rearview mirrors and hood ornaments float into place and attach themselves automatically.
The other goal is just as important, and more fundamental: to help researchers and companies build nanosized devices more easily. The key here is templates.
"We need to create tools that are able to select and orient nanotubes and other nanoscale objects on a surface. The point isn't to do it once, but to incorporate the templates into a high-rate, high-volume process," says Miller.
With this in mind, his group has synthesized a huge molecule made of thiols and carboxylic acids connected to soccer-ball-shaped fullerene molecules. In the proper chemical soup, these molecules align to create huge sheets—huge by nanostandards, anyway—with the fullerenes poking up in neat arrays less than three nanometers apart, like a molecular apple orchard stretching to infinity. The right sort of nanotubes will be attracted to this "orchard," creating a nanowire array that can be scooped up and placed on an electronic device.
Another approach to templates is being tested by physicist Karsten Pohl, an assistant professor of physics and a member of the materials science group, who is looking into making very thin sheets of metal atoms with neatly arranged molecule-sized holes in them. Nanotubes can be placed upright in these sulfur-filled cavities, creating a regular array of components ready to be used in industrial applications-in theory, at least.
"Anybody trying to make a nanodevice has similar problems—to manipulate nano elements and place them in selected positions. The goal is to develop template tools that could be used by virtually anybody, for any product," says Miller. "Essentially, we're making wrenches. Very, very small wrenches."
But wrenches for what? What is nano-technology, anyway?
Oddly, even though some predict it will be a $1 trillion industry in a decade, there's no good definition for the field, other than saying it involves manipulating materials at the nano scale.
It's such a new field that the name itself is just beginning to catch on. For example, James Harper, professor of physics and director of the Materials Science Program, lists more than a dozen research papers on his Web site concerning thin-film work, a staple of this field, yet only the most recent has the prefix "nano" in the title. It's not that researchers weren't working on nanoscale projects, he explains, it's just that they're not used to their work having applications in nanotechnology.
Harper's research deals with the reactions and properties of films, sometimes just a few atoms thick, when placed on other materials. This is the sort of basic research that will be UNH's strength in the new center.
"One of the challenges is to have materials with different properties exist very close to each other—for example, a metallic conductor with an insulator—and keeping their good qualities separate while shrinking them down as far as possible," Harper says. "The smaller you get, the harder it is to keep the properties separate."
This hurdle is typical of nanoscale work because it takes something that is well-understood on the everyday scale—applying films of material is what you do every time you paint the living room—and tries to make it work in the atomic world.
"We have hundreds of years of experience with materials in bulk form, but many of those properties don't tell you how they're going to behave at the atomic level. That's where the interesting physics come in: We're dealing with so few atoms that they behave differently; they aren't seeing themselves as part of a continuous material anymore," he says. "It can be very surprising."
In theory, nanotechnology has been possible since the 1920s, when Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg (whose son, Jochen, is a professor of physics at UNH) and others developed the theory of quantum mechanics, which defines the laws of physics that apply on very small scales. But nanotechnology only became a realistic goal in the past two decades after the development of the scanning tunneling microscope and subsequent devices that can not only see things as small as atoms, but can pick them up and move them as well.
The public first became aware of this ability in 1986, when IBM spelled out its logo with a handful of xenon atoms. "Some people consider that the beginning of nano-technology," says Miller. "It didn't really do anything useful, but it showed what could be done."
Karsten Pohl could spell out UNH with atoms if he wanted to, since he oversees UNH's atomic-resolution scanning tunneling microscope. Worth a quarter of a million dollars, the UNH-built microscope is one of the most expensive pieces of equipment on campus. With it, Pohl and his graduate students can make images of atoms and manipulate them at very low temperatures, thanks to bubbling vats of liquid nitrogen. They are also working on making templates for the alignment of nanotubes.
UNH is big into nanotubes. As the name implies, nanotubes are tiny cylindrical tubes, often made of carbon atoms, held together by atomic bonds. The hollow tubes have a number of interesting properties, including enormous strength ("nanoVelcro" made of tangled nanotubes is a potential replacement for glue) as well as the potential to conduct electricity.
A tiny tube that conducts electricity is a nanowire, a vital part of nanosized electrical components such as computer memory chips—hence the great interest.
"The microprocessing industry, the Intels of the world, create a commercial driving force for going smaller," says Miller. When creating computer chips, "there are limits with existing technology, and chip manufacturers are closing in on fundamental barriers," he notes. "But now they envision bottom-up techniques, where you start with small molecules and build up those features you want through guided self-assembly."
In the research world's Darwinian struggle for laboratory space, equipment, professorial salaries and students, the importance of a rich driving force cannot be overemphasized. In computers, smaller is also faster, and both are known commodities that sell. As a result, no one is saying "this is all pie-in-the-sky stuff," says Miller. "Not when Intel is involved."
There are, of course, problems—big problems. For one thing, nanotubes are easy to make but hard to make correctly. "No two nanotubes are alike. Nanotubes are single-walled, multi-walled, straight and curved, with large and small diameters," says Miller. This uncertainty comes about because they are currently created at high temperatures—at least 600 degrees Celsius—where "all hell breaks loose" at the atomic level.
Low temperatures are needed for nanotubes, says Miller.
"Right now, no technology exists that will produce a batch of nanotubes that are exactly alike. That's not good enough: Industry wants to be able to call a vendor and say, 'I want a billion conducting nanotubes, each 63 nanometers long and two nanometers wide and straight as an arrow.'" Miller's efforts to design new low-temperature processes that will make uniform batches of identical carbon nanotubes are funded with grants from the National Science Foundation and the Army.
But electronics isn't the only application for nanotechnology. Part of Claverie's work is figuring out whether nanoparticles can be used in paints to make them more environmentally friendly. That's a far cry from the sci-fi type of projects which get the most attention—such as the idea of using nanotubes to build an elevator into space—but Claverie says it's typical and more realistic.
"Many applications are going to be much more low-cost and less spectacular than people think, but important nonetheless," he says. "I don't do spectacular things—I don't do little spaceships inside the body," he adds, giving a nod to Isaac Asimov's 1966 science-fiction book Fantastic Voyage, where people are miniaturized and injected into a man's bloodstream to destroy a clot.
Actually, from a layman's point of view, Claverie has his eye on something nearly as impressive. "Take a drug which is not very compatible with the human anatomy—it could be toxic, or it could be proteins we cannot swallow because our stomach destroys proteins—and put them in a small bag of molecules designed in a very smart way. It goes through the intestines and then, because it is a smart bag, it knows to release the drug," he says.
"Another example is a 'magic bullet.' Put the chemotherapy drug in a bag with a sensor that targets only cancerous cells, so you avoid the side-effects of chemotherapy," he says. "This is absolutely not science fiction—there already are a few products on the market with this approach."
Most of Claverie's work is related to medical applications, financed by New Hampshire-based Bentley Pharmaceuticals, and he thinks we'll probably see nanotechnology in health-related applications before we see any in computers.
While much of this work is geared toward creating a product, the hard-to-predict behavior of mini-matter leaves scientists plenty of fundamental research questions to tackle.
"Consider melting, which is the most basic property of materials," says Pohl, who recently received a $450,000 NSF Career Award grant. "Atoms don't melt—it's a collective property—and nobody has ever seen at the atomic level what happens when a substance melts. We also don't know how it will affect nanosized devices."
When you don't even understand melting or the thermal properties of nanosystems, you've got a long way to go—which is part of the appeal to scientists, who prefer a good question to almost anything. Another appeal of this field is cross-pollination. "This may be the most interdisciplinary field I know of," says Miller. "There is no one field that is ideally suited to tackle all of the problems we suddenly face."
"I appreciate the fact that I can collaborate with a manufacturing workshop and yet still work in a field of very basic research," says Pohl.
One of the most intriguing aspects of nanotechnology is that debate on ethical and social issues has cropped up even before basic technical questions have been answered. Consider "gray goo," although most researchers will roll their eyes if you do.
That phrase was coined a couple years ago by Eric Drexler, the researcher who made the term "nanotechnology" popular and chairman emeritus of the Foresight Institute in Los Altos, Calif. It describes a catastrophic scenario in which microscopic robots start replicating themselves and spread over the Earth, consuming everything in their path. Although nanorobots don't seem very gooey and it's not clear what color they'd be, "gray goo" has become shorthand for this fear, which Michael Crichton turned into an apocalyptic novel, Prey.
The idea strikes most UNH researchers as absurd. "It's preposterous," says Miller, shifting out of his affable personality to show something close to irritation. "We're struggling to make simple devices—to make wires—and this is talking about terribly sophisticated devices that can't even be made at the macro level. It's so far removed from reality that it's ridiculous."
But Miller and others know that the fear demonstrates a real uncertainty that can't be ignored. Some toxicologists, for example, have raised questions about whether nano-based medicines might be risky when they cross the blood-brain barrier, which prevents toxins and other harmful substances from reaching the brain.
"Part of it is a fear of the unknown," says Claverie, who says he is not concerned by the toxicology studies he has seen so far. "But I think debate is great. These are old practices grafted on a new field of science—we have to be concerned about that. It won't always be easy to tell you the best way."
Shea, whose specialty is operations management, agrees that it's not too early to look at ethical and moral issues in the field, although she adds that approaching it as a homogeneous entity is a mistake.
"You can't just look at the environmental implications of nanotechnology—you've got to look at each application, each process, by itself," she says. "It's the same with business. In some sectors—computers, memory chips and so on—a new product may be an incremental change, and existing firms are not likely to be supplanted. But in others, the impact could be much more radical."
The benefits of having a solid core of nanoscale research at UNH are many. From the fiscal point of view, there's the benefit of grant funding, which helps underwrite research opportunities for undergraduate and graduates students that the university would otherwise have to fund. There's also the possibility of patent profits, although that's still a long way off.
Perhaps most important, however, is the opportunity to undertake influential research. "The number of universities doing this is very low, maybe 20, and they are big schools," says Claverie.
As a result, when the center takes off, UNH will occupy an unusual niche: a small university doing big things in a very small field.
David Brooks is the science correspondent for The Nashua Telegraph.