ABSTRACT
We have witnessed an ever-explosive growth of technology dealing with smaller and smaller scales in the past few decades. e quality of working with small scales that attracts more and more researchers to the eld is the promise that, one day, it will be possible to build matter from the bottom. e resulting structures will have tuned properties that surpass any material we have ever encountered in the macro domain. Since defects are expected to decrease with decreasing scale, materials might display a di erent behavior at small scales. For instance, if properties of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) can be somehow translated to larger scales, materials with super-strength and/or superconductivity can be achieved. ese materials will be much stronger but much lighter than steel, making them instant ideal candidates for building mechanical structures that need to resist large amounts of stresses, possibly for prolonged periods of time.
