Jeremy Ramsden - Nanotechnology: An Introduction

Front Matter

Copyright

First published 2011

Copyright 2011 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011924730

ISBN: 978-0-08-096447-8

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Dedication

imre madch

Preface

There are already hundreds of books in print on nanotechnology in English alone, at all levels up to that of the advanced researcher and ranging in coverage from detailed accounts of incremental improvements in existing microtechnologies to far-reaching visionary approaches toward productive nanosystems. Furthermore, not only do many old-established scientific journals in the fields of physics and chemistry now carry nanotechnology sections, but numerous scientific journals dedicated solely to nanotechnology have appeared and new ones are launched each year. In addition, a flood of commercially oriented reports about present and future nanotechnology markets is constantly being produced; these are often weighty documents comprising a thousand pages or more, whose reliability is difficult to assess, since even if they make use of publicly available data, the processing of those data in order to arrive at predictions is typically carried out using unrevealed algorithms.

Faced with this huge and burgeoning literature, the newcomer to the field, who may well have a strong background in one of the traditional disciplines such as physics, mechanical or electrical engineering, chemistry or biology, or who may have been working on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) (also known as microsystems technology, MST), is likely to feel confronted with a somewhat chaotic and colorful scene from which it is often difficult to extract meaning. The goal of this book is to tackle that problem by presenting an overview of the entire field, focusing on key essentials, with which the reader will be able to erect his or her own personal scaffold on which the amazingly diverse plethora of detailed information emerging from countless laboratories all over the world can be structured into some kind of coherent order. The emphasis is therefore on concepts; any attempt to complement this by capturing all the latest specific discoveries and inventions in nanotechnology, other than illustratively, would almost immediately become out of date; the aim of this book might briefly be stated as being to make sense of nanotechnologyto explain things thoroughly enough to be intelligible while still remaining introductory.