Where are the Best Destinations for Nanotechnology Excursions Outside Europe?

[superwolf]

Hi

I'm member of a group planning an excursion for nanotechnology students, preferably outside Europe. The trip will last three weeks, including five days with content relevant to micro or nanotechnology. Japan is an obvious alternative, the same is the US (maybe California or NY?), but are there other options?

 

[f95toli]

What do you mean by "nanotechnology"?
The word means different things to different people and is nowadays used to describe everything from biochemistry to deodorants.

 

[superwolf]

Everything that involves controlling matter on an atomic and molecular scale.

 

[f95toli]

That narrows it down quite a bit. We are still not very good at controlling matter at that scale; there are well-developed methods that work well down to a few tens of nm but below that you run into all sorts of problems.
Most of the work being done at the "real" nm scale is more chemistry than physics (and much of it has been around for a long time, they just didn't call it nanotechnology).
An obvious example would be "molecular motors" etc. There has also been some limited success controlling matter using scanning probe techniques (AFM and STM), that work is interesting but can not really be scaled up.

Don't get me wrong; work IS being done but it is still very much a small niche and it isn't really "huge" anywhere.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

Where is nanotechnology huge?

Like large-scale miniaturization?

 

[superwolf]

Don't get me wrong; work IS being done but it is still very much a small niche and it isn't really "huge" anywhere.

OK, but anyway we are going somewhere, so where is work being done?

 

[lisab]

Like large-scale miniaturization?

I was thinking, nanotechnology is huge in femto-land.

 

[neu]

I'm in the london centre for nanotechnology, pop by. I'll show you my scanning probe