ABSTRACT
Nanotechnology is the term used to describe the creation and exploitation of materials with structural features in between those of atoms and bulk materials with atleast one dimension in the nanometerrange (1 nm =10−9 m). Nano comes from nanos, a Greek word meaning “dwarf”; it refers to things of one-billionth 10−9 of a meter in size. The word “nanotechnology” was rst used by Norio Taniguchi in 1974 in apaper entitled “On the basic Concept of Nano-Technology” presented atthe international conference on production engineering, held in Tokyo, Japan. Man has been learning from nature since nomadic times and certain efcient substitutes in manufacturing and design have been found. In the early sixteenth century Roman times, the Lycurgus cup was found to be coated with colloidal gold and silver, and “A labor of the Months” in Norwich England was coated with gold nanoparticles. Richard Feynman and Eric Drexler popularized this concept of nanotechnologyas anew and developing technology in which man manipulates objects whose dimensions are approximately between 1and 100 nm. In the last decade of the twentieth century, research in nanotechnology has burgeoned and has been employed in other disciplines like physics, chemistry, biology, material science, and medicine.
