Nanoscale Elements in Traditional Technologies
From the present knowledge of materials it is understood that the beautiful colors of stained glass windows originate in nanometer scale metal particles present in the glass. These metal particles have scattering resonances for light of specific wavelengths, depending on the particle size L. The particle size distribution, in turn, will depend upon the choice of metal impurity, its concentration, and the heat treatment of the glass. When the metallic particles in the glass are illuminated, they...
Scaling the xylophone
The familiar xylophone produces musical sounds when its keys a linear array of rectangular bars of dimensions axbxc, with progressively longer key lengths c producing lower audio frequencies are struck by a mallet and go into transverse vibration perpendicular to the smallest, a, dimension. The traditional middle C in music corresponds to 256 Hz. If the size scale of the xylophone key is reduced to the micrometer scale, as has recently been achieved, using the semiconductor technology, and the...
Nanopore Filters
The original nanopore Nuclepore filters 10,11 are sheets of polycarbonate of 6-11 im thickness with closely spaced arrays of parallel holes running through the sheet. The filters are available with pore sizes rated from 0.015 Jim - 12.0 im 15 nm - 12 000nm . The holes are made by exposing the polycarbonate sheets to perpendicular flux of ionizing a particles, which produce linear paths of atomic scale damage in the polycarbonate. Controlled chemical etching is then employed to establish and...