Synthesis and direct patterning of functional nanostructures on flat and flexible substrates towards device fabrication

Abstract

The dawn of nanoscience and nanotechnology is considered to be the lecture There's plenty of room at the bottom delivered by a visionary physicist, Richard Feynmann in 1959 [1]. Drexler elaborated this idea in his technical book Nanosystems [2]. Since ancient Roman times, colloidal gold has been known and was used to colour glass with intense shades of yellow, red, or mauve varying the concentration of gold. Before the name nanoscience and technology was coined, Michael Faraday prepared colloidal Au sol and named it as a metallic divided state [3]. Nano (=dwarf in Greek) is a scale (=10-9) rather than a specific discipline of science or engineering. The science of nanotechnology is basically looking at important phenomena that become apparent when one goes to very small scales. To get a feel for the nanoscale, one can take an example of a strand of human hair (~60-100 ?m) width. A nanometer is ~10,000 times smaller than a single strand of hair. In simple terM.S., one nanometer is to a tennis ball, what a tennis ball is to the Earth. A cartoon comparison of various natural and man-made nano and micron sized systems is shown below (Figure I.1). Figure