Faculty and Research

Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

Stanford's strategic priority in nanoscience and nanotechnology provides researchers with the tools to manipulate matter on the scale of atoms and molecules — roughly one billionth of a meter — in order to better understand matter at that tiny scale.

Encompassing materials science, chemistry and many other fields, nanotechnology allows scientists to build materials and structures from the bottom up, producing devices as small as human cells.

Researchers can engineer new drugs, find different ways to sequence DNA, develop novel semiconductors, and produce khaki pants that are water repellant or composites with ultra-high strength. They can develop crystals and even artificial atoms that give them unprecedented control of light. Nanotechnology may bear fruit in applications as diverse as water purification, energy conversion, biochemical detection, transportation and national security.

Much of the work in nanoscience and nanotechnology is experimental, and researchers often do not know the performance of an extremely small component or device until they build it. The establishment of shared, flexible labs are essential for building structures and measuring their performance. Stanford's shared facilities include the recently upgraded Stanford Nanocharacterization Lab in the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials, the Center for Probing the Nanoscale, and the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility, a national resource for academic, industrial and government users that obtains half its operating budget from the National Science Foundation.

An experimental sandbox
"We want to give our students and faculty ample opportunity to play in this new sandbox, where matter is manipulated at atomic and molecular scales," says Jim Plummer, dean of the School of Engineering. "We will judge the Nanoscience and Nanotechnology initiative successful if we find our students and faculty across a wide range of disciplines to be frontrunners in their respective fields."
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