In This Edition

Tiny Technologies

Part 1: Bits and Molecules

Part 2: Materials and Processes

Part 3: Living Molecular Machines

Questions & Answers

Bruce Blomstrom, '59, SM '62 Chairman, Nanostream, Inc.

Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli '94 Co-author on a recent Nature article on biomolecules and radio waves

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Tiny technologies, as small as a nanometer--one billionth of a meter--or a molecular machine, are expected to lead to computers that race on light not silicon, medical treatments that operate on the sub-molecular level, and perhaps, quantum computers that can escape today's physical limitations.

The cascade of interdisciplinary research at MIT ranges from the Microphotonics Center's push to develop light-based tools to reduce telecommunications components by a factor of 100 to a Bioengineering and Environmental Health group's application of molecular scissors to the sugar jackets of cancer cells to inhibit tumors. Projects at the Media Laboratory's Silicon Biology group include Nanoscale Sensing, where creating a single electron transistor involves writing 10 nm-sized titanium oxide lines and dashes with an atomic force microscope.

This month's openDOOR looks at tiny technologies:

• Bits and Molecules: Center for Bits and Atoms, quantum computation, personal fabrication, molecular machines, Ab Initio Physics, photonic crystals, MITite, quantum dots.
• Materials and Processes: Microphotonics, NanoStructures Laboratory, nanomagnets, Space Nanotechnology, electro-optical polymers, optical nanotechnologies.
• Living Molecular Machines: Diagnostic MEMS, processing nanostructured materials, Silicon Biology, microfluidics, single-electron transistor, talking to biomolecule.

MIT's annual Materials Day in October, sponsored by the Materials Processing Center, focused on tiny materials--from one to a few nanometers--that will be the future building blocks of nanostructure optical and electronic devices. New techniques that aim to transform telecommunications, data communications, and computing include techniques to pattern electro-optical polymers on various substrates. Fabrication of many tiny technologies is centered at the interdepartmental Microsystems Technology Laboratories, which offers microfabrication facilities for micron, submicron, and nanometer structures used in integrated systems ranging from X-ray lenses to VLSI circuits to micro-gas turbine engines.

MIT's most recent Nobel Prize went to Wolfgang Ketterle, who shared the physics prize with MIT alumni Eric A. Cornell, PhD '90, and Carl E. Wieman, PhD '73, for causing atoms to cluster and lose individual identity, thus demonstrating a new state of matter called the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC). In one BEC experiment, Ketterle, who is affiliated with the Research Laboratory of Electronics, demonstrated the world's first atom laser.

Banner photo: Prof. Paula Hammond (ChemE) can place tiny (0.5 micron diameter) polystyrene latex spheres in exact patterns on a substrate by pre-stamping it with polymer "template." Photo copyright Felice Frankel 2001.