The commonly used term "nanotechnology" refers to the use of materials with structural sizes ranging from a few atoms to around 100 nanometers (nm). A nanometer is one billionth or one thousand millionth of a meter. In the first part of the lecture, we will first have to ask ourselves why it is so exciting to produce or use materials in these structural sizes? It's actually extremely impractical!
Once the benefits and dimensions of nanomaterials have been explained, the second part of the lecture will focus on the production of nanomaterials using ion beams. Ion beams can be generated in large accelerator facilities and shot at materials. The processes involved are very complex, but can be simply described by the words "digging", "clumping together" or "transforming".
After the 30-minute lecture, there will be an opportunity to view the particle accelerators ROMEO and JULIA as well as a state-of-the-art electron microscope with a focused ion beam, which are operated at the Institute of Solid State Physics. On the latter device, we would like to demonstrate that names can be written in hair if a person is willing to donate a hair.
