Description: Miniaturization has revolutionized human affairs by making possible inexpensive integrated electronic circuits comprised of devices and wires with sub-micrometer dimensions. These integrated circuits are now ubiquitous, controlling everything from our automobiles to our toasters. Continued miniaturization, beyond sub-micrometer dimensions, seems likely. And so we are compelled to explore science and technology on a new, yet smaller scale: the nanometer scale. This volume is a survey of the machinery and science of the nanometer scale. Its twenty-two contributing authors, drawn from many different disciplines including atomic physics, microelectronics, polymer chemistry, and bio-physics, delineate the course of current research and articulate a vision for the development of the nanometer frontiers in electronics, mechanics, chemistry, magnetics, materials, and biology. They reveal a world thirty years hence where motors are smaller than the diameter of a human hair; where single-celled organisms are programmed to fabricate materials with nanometer precision; where single atoms are used for computation, and where quantum chaos is the norm.

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