Items Tagged With Lithography

Ever since the invention of the first scanning probe microscope in 1981, researchers have believed the powerful tool would someday be used for the nanofabrication and nanopatterning of surfaces in a molecule-by-molecule, bottom-up fashion. Despite 25 years of research in this area, the world has hit a brick wall in developing a technique with commercial potential—until now.

The International Council on Nanotechnology (ICON) today issued a comprehensive review of existing efforts to develop “best practices” for handling nanomaterials in the workplace. The work was performed by researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) as part of a two-phase project to catalogue how industry is managing the potential occupational safety risks posed by nanomaterials.

An innovative and inexpensive way of making nanomaterials on a large scale has resulted in novel forms of advanced materials that pave the way for exceptional and unexpected optical properties. The new fabrication technique, known as soft lithography, offers many significant advantages over existing techniques, including the ability to scale-up the manufacturing process to produce devices in large quantities.

Regulatory oversight of nanotechnology is urgently needed and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should act now, reports a new study released today. In EPA and Nanotechnology: Oversight for the 21st Century, former EPA assistant administrator for policy, planning and evaluation, J. Clarence (Terry) Davies, provides a roadmap for a new EPA to better handle the challenges of nanotechnology. New nanomaterials and nanotechnology products are entering the market each week, and an adequate oversight system is necessary to identify and minimize any adverse effects of nano materials and products on health or the environment. Davies’ report sets out an agenda for creating an effective oversight system as nanotechnology advances—the technology that some have hailed as “the next industrial revolution.”

Detecting residual vapours of chemicals, explosives and biological agents without delving into people's luggage is the future of airport security with the help of research at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Co-Leader of QUT's Applied Optics Programme Dr Dmitri Gramotnev said his research had discovered special metallic structures called plasmonic waveguides that could focus light into nanoscale regions, unachievable in conventional optics. These structures may allow detection and identification of extremely small amounts of substances, even separate molecules in the air.