Programme details

In this film we’re heading deep into the world of nanoscience, down to the dimension of an atom. We will find out what tools scientists have developed to explore this new reality, opening up an apparently infinite field of research and practical applications.
But what do we mean by nanotechnology? It means doing things on a small scale. It's such a vast area. It's technology on a very small scale. It can be chemistry, or physics, or perhaps biology.

In Europe, nanoparticles are already causing a revolution in the way people do research. At INM (Institute for New Materials in Saarbrucken, Germany) researchers already developed applications using nanoparticles. The new concept which is developed at the institute isn't only limited to research and fundamental research, but also endeavours to accompany all the disciplines right up to the finished product, and to take part in the whole engineering process. They developed several products containing nanoparticles such as paint containing nanoparticles which makes it impossible to scratch or glasses, which gradually go darker as the light gets brighter or a flat surface repelling water.
To explain these phenomena, all these objects have a common denominator: nanoparticles on their surface or inside them.
And to understand how industry has managed to manipulate these molecules at the atomic scale, you need to understand how scientists gave them the means to do it.

In order to see particles no bigger than a few millionths of a metre, scientists have invented a microscope which allows these particles to be manipulated. Like the white stick of the blind, the tip of the microscope probes the surface of the atoms so as to reveal their outlines.
The tip of the microscope is brought near the surface of an atom and is moved over the surface, very, very close to the surface so as to record the interactions between the tip and the surface.
When the tip of the microscope moves, the atoms on the surface and those on the tip exchange electrons. With an electronic microscope like this, what you see on the screen or on a still picture is not the result of light, but of a calculation, giving an image which results from measuring the voltage and the intensity of the flux of electrons, which varies as the tip moves over the atoms. This enables us to obtain a sort of relief map of the surface being moved over, atom by atom.

An atom is made of a nucleus, surrounded by a certain amount of electrons revolving around it, but electrons do not revolve around a nucleus on a given trajectory like a satellite around a planet. No scientist can predict with certainty where those electrons are at a given time. Sometimes, an electron may move farther away than usual from its nucleus. As on this scale, there inevitably is another atom not far away, sometimes, the electron ends up turning in the electron cloud of that other atom, having broken through the barrier that held it around its nucleus. This electron transfer is called « tunnel effect ».
This finds an important application in the “Scanning Tunnelling Microscope”. By increasing the flux of electrons flowing through the tip of the microscope a given atom can be attracted. This tool that can feel matter and thus give us an image. By gouging out atoms it can also draw lines or more complex patterns to make circuits, such as electronic circuits.
In this phase scientists are, trying to create what they want to create, the shapes they want, the atomic configuration they want, so that in the future this can be reproduced on an industrial scale and so that we can design circuits or electronic systems on this ultimate, tiny scale.

Most applied research in Europe is centred around improving computers' memory capacity… In the race to get ever smaller the engineers at Seagate have managed to make a read/write head only a few atoms thick. At this scale, you can play on the fluctuations in the magnetic pole inside each atom. These fluctuations can be used to code for the information to be stored. With this technique the storage capacity of hard disks has increased tenfold. But research is moving forward so fast that other rival systems have already appeared on the scene.

Elsewhere in Europe, researchers are exploring a completely different method in which molecular robots convert matter using matter itself. In this technique, scientists succeeded to move molecules pushed along by the tip of the scanning tunnelling microscope. Throughout Europe nanorobots are being developed which may be able to move hundreds of thousands of molecules simultaneously.

Harold Kroto's team from Sussex University UK, discovered aspontaneously-formed structure of matter. It was while they were attempting to understand the origins of the Universe.
This discovery, dubbed fullerene, was a completely new structure of carbon, which until then was known only as the very common charcoal, as graphite, or as the very rare diamond. A Japanese team has completed the picture with a very similar structure, known as carbon nanotubes.
The mechanical property is determined by how these two atoms are connected to eachother, how strongly they are connected, in this carbon nanotube the connection is even stronger than in a diamond.
The amazing thing about this material is that it is perhaps the strongest object that has ever been made. This new carbon structure look set to take over from old-fashioned steel. But they also conduct electricity perfectly and could therefore contribute greatly to the development of information technology.

In Bologna, Italy, Carlo Taliani and his team are studying at a fundamental research level how to improve the efficiency of electronic circuits based on organic materials.
European industry is taking a great deal of interest in this, and improving this property means that it will be possible to have very cheap, widely available electronics, which could bring about a revolution in our everyday life.
Nanotechnologies reflect the rhythm and dimension of nature itself. Some think I think that with this miniaturisation, man is trying to imitate what nature has been doing throughout the course of evolution.
At this point in our story we can begin to get a glimpse of the range of applications that could flow from the nanosciences. We can dream of more or less distant applications, or else see for ourselves that the nanotechnologies are already here with us today.
The last concrete example is a method for early detection of AIDS. This screening method is still in its development fase, it demonstrates the extent to which nanoparticles could have other uses, especially in the biomedical field.

Europe has played a leading role in the development of nanosciences and nanotechnologies, you can see this from the number of papers published over the last few years. Europe has always been ahead compared with other developed countries, but the other countries are now moving into the arena and are investing heavily. If Europe wishes to keep its leadership, or at any rate a leading role, it must invest more both in human and material resources.