Big names in nano world turn out for ASME's first meeting on topic

Harry Hutchinson
Mechanical Engineering magazine
WASHINGTON — Interest in the world of nanotechnology is so great that the location of ASME's first meeting on the subject, "Beyond Micro Device Engineering: Nanotechnology," had to be moved to accommodate the larger-than-expected crowd.

More than 150 people, representing a mix of government, industry and academia, attended the meeting here last month, attracted by the names of featured speakers including: Steven Chu, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1997 for his work on methods of cooling and trapping atoms with laser light; Carlo Montemagno, whose team at Cornell made headlines in November developing a molecular machine powered by an enzyme, and Mihail Roco, the ASME Fellow who is senior advisor for nanotechnology in the Directorate for Engineering at the National Science Foundation.

Several of those speakers considered the mechanical engineer's role in the decidedly multidisciplinary field and, by extension, that of ASME. Because the technology and its uses are in development, ASME President John R. Parker said in opening remarks that the workshop is likely "to be a springboard to many more ASME events."

Albert P. Pisano, chair of the steering committee that organized the conference, said the purpose of the event was to explore ways to foster nanoscale research "under the auspices of this engineering organization."

Pisano, FANUC chair of mechanical systems in the Department of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, is an authority on microelectromechanical systems and, as his bio put it, was on loan to the federal government from Berkeley from 1997 through '99, when he led the MEMS program for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

In his presentation, "From MEMS Down to NEMS," Michael Roukes, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, defined nanotechnology as "fundamentally mechanical."

"Signals in the mechanical domain are forces," he said. Given the extremely fast physical response times of nanostructures, for example, mechanical switches built on the molecular level may outperform electronic switches.

The California Molecular Electronics Corp. of San Jose, Calif., patented the design of a molecular chemical switch, which it licenses under the name Chiropticene. James J. Marek, CEO of California Molecular, predicted that a 3-D memory unit based on the Chiropticene switch could be complete in approximately three years.

The 3-D unit might have half or a third of the volume of a conventional computer hard disk, and capacity for 1,000 times the data.

Chu, the Theodore and Francis Geballe Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University, pointed out that research on the nanoscale represents a new way of understanding systems.

"Most of what we know about chemistry and biology has been studied from the bulk level," he said. Researchers are taking a closer look to see what they might have missed.

Examining single-molecule systems would permit researchers to "observe transient intermediate steps, multiple paths and fluctuations at equilibrium," he said.

Carbon nanotubes, hollow cylinders a few atoms in diameter, are under study in plenty of labs. From the University of California, Berkeley, physics professor Alex Zettl discussed the possibilities of using them as frictionless bearings, sealless cylinders, or submicroscopic engines.

During the luncheon, Roco, one of the federal government's leading experts in the field of nanotechnology and an organizer of the conference, reminded everyone that federal funds devoted to nanotechnology research for fiscal 2001 total $422 million, a 56 percent increase above last year.

Roco is also the author of an article in this month's issue of Mechanical Engineering magazine. The article, which recaps his speech to the group, launches a year-long series by the magazine in which experts will discuss issues surrounding nanoscale technology.

When the topic of selling and using nanoscale products came up, the talk was mostly in the future tense. Richard W. Siegel of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is trying to commercialize a product now.

Siegel, the Robert W. Hunt Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Rensselaer, founded a company to market nanoscale coatings. According to Siegel, the company, Nanophase Technologies Corp., will be able to supply materials in the range of 4 or 5 nanometers for coatings that might, for instance, increase the abrasion or UV resistance or the conductivity of a surface.

S. Thomas Picraux, director of physical and chemical sciences at Sandia National Laboratory, also pointed out a here-and-now use for discoveries of NEMS research. For instance, surface attraction, often irrelevant at the macro level, grows in importance as devices get smaller. According to Picraux, "We need to consider properties at the nanoscale to resolve issues at the micro."

The change in rules as the scale drops also was important to Mildred S. Dresselhaus. She is director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy and is one of a dozen Institute Professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she spends much of her spare time studying buckyballs and nanotubes.

"There needs to be an investment in science to discover new principles encountered at the nanoscale," Dresselhaus said.

She suggested that one of the practical future possibilities from applied nanoscience may be the ability to make integrated circuits with heat-conducting molecules as built-in cooling components.

Montemagno, an associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Cornell University, said that work on the nano level requires interdisciplinary diversity.

He worked on the ATPase biomolecular motor described in Nature, and then in the nation's newspapers, in November. The motor used an enzyme molecule to turn a rotor three-quarters of a micrometer long.

Montemagno seemed a touch embarrassed by some of the publicity. He told the crowd that Cornell had not — and he stressed "not" — developed tiny helicopters that could drop bombs on diseased cells.

At one point during the proceedings, after hearing several speakers, Pisano remarked, "We're rewriting the curriculum for mechanical engineering."

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