Unfamiliar as it is, the nanoscale can be difficult to grasp.
Although “Man is the measure of all things” we have chosen to start with something smaller - the all too familiar Scottish Midge – the small biting insect. The one illustrated here is from Loch Lomond.
To give some idea of perspective, the midge is shown next to a silicon chip. The length of the midge is a few millimetres or around 1 million times bigger than a nanometer. If we look more closely at the midge using the remarkable resolution of the scanning electron microscope we can see much smaller features. The midge has a compound eye made up of many small eyelets. Looking more closely at one of them - the diameter is around 15 microns or 15000 times bigger than 1 nanometer.
If we look at the hairs between the eyelets we begin to get down to the nanoscale. The diameter of these hairs at their base is around 100 nanometers. Engineers can make devices on this scale and much smaller. Routinely, computer memory chips are manufactured that have features of around 100 nanometers and some devices like the Quantum Cascade Laser have layers of different semiconductor alloys that are one nanometer thick.
“In small proportions we just beauty see ” Ben Jonson
SEM images: Alexander Ross, Department of Electrical Engineering, Glasgow University.
© 2007 M. Robertson/Nanovisions
|
|
