Material Growth & Surface Nucleation

Silicon, used in computer applications, must be virtually defect-free and cannot contain more than part-per-billion levels of certain impurities. To control the purity of materials with this level of precision, each new layer of atoms must be added in the correct manner as the material grows. The new surface layer formed becomes buried by additional atoms as growth continues. In this sense, understanding materials growth boils down to understanding the behavior of atoms (or molecules) on surfaces. <more>

Carbon Nanotubes

Otto Zhou can make them, and he’s learning how to use them. But so far, only Nature knows exactly how and why they form. Carbon nanotubes, Zhou explains, materialize from a vapor after he uses a high-powered laser to blast a hole through a dime-sized pellet of graphite. The blasting is fiery and spectacular. The tubes are not. If you could actually see one, the tube would look something like a roll of chicken wire—a single layer of carbon atoms linked up in a fabric of hexagons. <more>

Liquid Memory

Chris Dwyer, a graduate student in computer science, has ventured into a nanoscience research project so technically diverse that no one on his thesis committee understands it all. The goal? To create, in a small vial of liquid, enough computing power to equal all of the Pentium processors ever made, or enough memory to, say, store all of the individual genetic information for 10 billion people. <more>