Kit Cooley & Vic Lynn 
Nanotechnology 
Principles and Practices

Nanotechnology has the potential to revolutionize the agricultural and food industry with new tools for the molecular treatment of diseases, rapid disease detection, enhancing the ability of plants to absorb nutrients etc. Nanotechnology combines solid state physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, biochemistry and biophysics, and materials science. It is a highly interdisciplinary area meaning that it involves ideas integrated from many traditional discipline. Nanotechnology (NT) is the production and use of materials with purposely engineered features close to the atomic or molecular scale. NT deals with putting things together atom by atom and with structures so small they are invisible to the naked eye. It provides the ability to create materials, devices and systems with fundamentally new functions and properties. The promise of NT is enormous. It has implications for almost every type of manufacturing process and product. Nanomaterials have extremely small size which having at least one dimension 100 nm or less. Nanomaterials can be nanoscale in one dimension (e.g. surface films), two dimensions (e.g. strands or fibres), or three dimensions (e.g. particles). They can exist in single, fused, aggregated or agglomerated forms with spherical, tubular, and irregular shapes. Common types of nanomaterials include nanotubes, dendrimers, quantum dots and fullerenes. Nanoparticle research is currently an area of intense scientific research, due to a wide variety of potential applications in biomedical, optical, and electronic fields. Nanoparticles are of great scientific interest as they are effectively a bridge between bulk materials and atomic or molecular structures. A bulk material should have constant physical properties regardless of its size, but at the nano-scale this is often not the case. This book introduces the reader to the world of nanotechnology by giving them in-depth details of different aspects of the field.