March 2014
Intermediate to advanced
624 pages
26h 33m
English
Nanotechnology is sometimes defined as engineered objects in the length scale of 1–100 nm with novel, useful properties. This nanoscale regime, sometimes also known as the mesoscale, lies between the microscale (~microns) and atomic/molecular scale (~0.1 nm). When objects are shrunk from the macro to microscale and beyond, they don’t just become smaller, but they also behave differently. One way to appreciate this is if one considers the fraction of atoms that lie at the surface of a sphere. For macroscopic or microscopic dimensions, the vast majority of the atoms are found to lie in the bulk of the sphere. As one enters the mesoscale, a substantial fraction of the atoms are found to be at the surface, which very often ...