Notes of the course nano scales part

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Bioarti cial systems at the micro and nano scale L A T E X notes Nano part by prof. Alfonso Gautieri Giuseppe Lauricella 1 Introduction The course will discuss the main applications at the nano scale, where the physics is dierent from the micro scale. It will focus on the biological and biomedical eld, such as nanotubes, quantum dots and systems made of molecules. An introduction to imaging and molecular modeling will be done. In the second part of the course, some examples will be described. 1.1 Nanotechnology and nanoscience: hystory Nanoscience is the study of phenomena and manipulation of materials at atomic, molecular and macromolecular scales, where properties dier signi cantly from those at a larger scale . Nanotechnologies is referred to the design of those systems. The de nition of bioarti cial systems at the nanoscale is not xed, but generally speaking we refer to arti cial strctures with an application in the heath eld. The common tract is the characteristic size of the nanoscale. These are the main applications we'll deal with: Figure 1: Main applications at the nanoscale The origin of this eld dates back to 1959 when Richard Feynman gave is famous lecture " There's plenty of room at the bottom" . In this lecture, he hypothtized that we're moving towards an era where we could model structures at the nanoscale. He never mentioned the word nanotechnology, that was used for the rst time in 1974, by a japanese professor. The rst key example of nanotech came in 1981 where researcher at the IBM institute were able to manipulate single atoms. They were able to move Xenon atoms, forming the text in gure 2. 1 Figure 2: Binning and Rohrer application of scanning tunnelling microscope. The original idea was to move atoms to create a memory, where the bits consist in…