ABSTRACT
The ‘nanotechnology’ indicates a multidisciplinary approach concerning materials, devices and systems in which at least one of the three characteristic dimensions of their components is measured at nanometric scale. The materials, whose structural and functional properties depend on components with at least one dimension at nanometric scale, are said nanostructural materials and the nanometric components are said nanostructures. Electronics gave a strong impulse to the development of nanotechnologies through the progress in Physics, by which it depends on the fundamental understanding of processes at nanometric scale. In the zero-dimensional nanostructures, such as atomic clusters, nanocrystals and quantum dots, the discrete energy levels move in an appreciable way through the addition or the subtraction of a single electric charge. Two opposite procedures of manufacture of nanostructures are possible, i.e., ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. The experimental techniques for the controlled fabrication of nanotubes and nanocrystals, quantum dots and wells, produced an entirely new set of elementary nanostructures.
