Методичка по английскому языку для ИТС (пр. С.С.Иванов)

Module 5. Nanotechnology

Unit 1

I. Read the text and find the terms consisting of the prefix «nano-».

II. Be ready to comment on the terms. Memorize them.

Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology comprises technological developments on the nanometer scale, usually 0.1 to 100 nm (1/1,000 um, or 1/1,000,000 mm). This is about ten thousand times smaller than the width of a hair. Nanotechnology is any technology which exploits phenomena and structures that can only occur at the nanometer scale, which is the scale of several atoms and small molecules. The United States' National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) website defines it as follows: "Nanotechnology is the understanding and control of matter at dimensions of roughly 1 to 100 nanometers, where unique phenomena enable novel applications." Such phenomena include quantum confinement--which can result in different electromagnetic and optical properties of a material between nanoparticles and the bulk material; the Gibbs-Thomson effect--which is the lowering of the melting point of a material when it is nanometers in size; and such structures as carbon.

Nanoscience and nanotechnology are an extension of the field of materials science, and materials science departments at universities around the world in conjunction with physics, mechanical engineering, bioengineering, and chemical engineering departments are leading the breakthroughs in nanotechnology. The related term nanotechnology is used to describe the interdisciplinary fields of science devoted to the study of nanoscale phenomena employed in nanotechnology. Nanoscience is the world of atoms, molecules, macromolecules, quantum dots, and macromolecular assemblies, and is dominated by surface effects such as Van der Waals force attraction, hydrogen bonding, electronic charge, ionic bonding, соvalent bonding, hydrophilicity, and quantum mechanical tunneling, to the virtual exclusion of macro-scale effects such as turbulence and inertia. For example, the vastly increased ratio of surface area to volume opens new possibilities in surface-based science, such as catalysis.

History of use

The first mention of some of the distinguishing concepts in nanotechnology was in 'There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," a talk given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society. Feynman

220

described a process by which the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules might be developed, using one set of precise tools to build and operate another proportionally smaller set, so on down to the needed scale.

The term "nanotechnology" was defined by Tokyo Science University Professor Norio Taniguchi in a 1974 paper as follows: '"Nano-technology' mainly consists of the processing of, separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule." In the 1980s the basic idea of this definition was explored in much more depth by Dr. Eric Drexler, who promoted the technological significance of nano-scale phenomena and devices through speeches and the books.

What is Nanotechnology?

While many definitions for nanotechnology exist, the NNI calls it "nanotechnology" only if it involves all of the following:

1.Research and technology development at the atomic, molecular or macromolecular levels, in the length scale of approximately 1-100 nanometer range.

2.Creating and using structures, devices and systems that have novel properties and functions because of their small and/or intermediate size.

3.Ability to control or manipulate on the atomic scale.

III. Find in the dictionary Russian equivalents for the following English words a word combinations. Read them correctly and memorize them:

phenomena and structures

at dimensions of

novel application

quantum confinement

breakthroughs

macromolecules

macromolecular assemblies

turbulence and inertia

precise fools

to promote the technological significance

221

to involve

approximately

to create structures

to manipulate on the atomic scale

IV. Give written translation of the paragraph «What is nanotechnology?»

Unit II

I. Read the text looking for the information about how nanotechnology provides a renewed idea of welfare.

nanotechnologies - huge OPPORTUNITIES AND MANY UNKNOWNS

Renewing the world with nanotechnologies – New boost for competitiveness and welfare Evolution of nanotechnologies and their opportunitiess for citizens and welfare.

Dr. F. Roure, French ministry of economy, finance and industry.

The development of nanotechnologies has opened the way to major scientific discoveries and consequently pushed innovation forward in fields of increasing complexitiy, from already available synthetic nanoparticles and nanomaterials, to nanosystems and networks of nano-enabled systems tomorrow.

Nanotechnology-enabled and converging transformational technologies bring with them an entirely new, unthought world with huge potential advantages for the people, as well as potential hyperchoice. The conditions of a fair competition amongst stakeholders - private as well as public onesleading to better, sustainable and appropriate technical solutions at more affordable price, may not be spontaneously provided. Nanotechnologies exports control, industrial secrecy and intellectual property rights models, inherited from the industrial revolution need, to be redesigned for a knowledge-based society, as well as the ways and means by which democracies sort out the acceptable finalities of nano-enhanced progress, from the ones requiring repressive measures.

Nanotechnology-based, green-house gas effect neutral energy technologies, nanofiltration for bringing drinkable water to the 2.3 billion people who lack it, raw materials scarcity, nano-enabled security and safety

222

technologies of surveillance and tracking/tracing technologies compliant with privacy and human rights, pervasive mobility and ubiquity allowed by nanoelectronics, sustainable mind and body functionalities provided by nanodevices for medicine, are providing a renewed idea of welfare. The already hanging fruits in those domains should be fairly presented to the consumers, and appropriate regulations, if duly rooted upon the pilars of environmental and societal risk assessments, are expected to strengthening the co-evolution of quality of life and of the industrial production on a world-wide basis.

Public "metrics", statistics and economic indicators are lacking behind the on-going production and trade expansion related to nanotechnologies, leaving researchers and the public authorities with interesting, but partial and onerous estimations of markets and activities, offered under private responsibility. Foresight, strategic planning and public policies would benefit from a quick and significant improvement of state-of-the-art publicly available datas and assessment methodologies, in order to define appropriate evaluation and a joint, global governance framework.

Facing major initiatives in the Asia-Pacific areas as well as in North America, supported by private funding from research to seed and venture capital as well as by public precompetitive research and procurement fundings, the European stakeholders, living in an ageing area, may consider sustainable development and social welfare requirements as valuable cultural incentives for promoting an internationally competitive supply of european industrial nanotechnologies and nano-enabled goods and services.

II. Add to your list of words with the prefix «nano-» some new words from this text. Comment on them. Learn them.

III. Find the corresponding English equivalents in the text. Read them correctly a memorize them.

открыть путь

ускорить инновационный процесс

огромные преимущества в будущем

честное соревнование

общество, базирующееся на знании

основанный на нанотехнологии

нехватка сырья

223

технология наблюдения и прослеживания отставать от предвидение извлекать пользу, выгоду устойчивое развитие

необходимые условия социального обеспечения

IV. Answer the following questions.

1.How has the development of nanotechnologies pushed innovation

forward?

2.What will strengthen the coevolution of quality of life?

3.Statistics and economic indicators are not lacking behind the on – going production, are they?

V. Write a summary on the text.

Unit III

I. Read the text looking for the essence of the inverse electron spin resonance process and its value.

Microchip miniaturisation barrier could be broken by nanotechnology

A project that could remove the electrical wiring in microchips, allowing denser circuitry, could result in computers with 500 times the power of present day technology. The University of Bath is to lead an international £555,000 three-year project to develop the wireless silicon chip system. As microchip circuits are made smaller to increase processing power they approach a limit imposed by the need to use electric wiring, which weakens signals sent between computer components at high speed. Wireless systems are in widespread use in mobile phones, Bluetooth gadgets, Wi-fi computers etc, but the electronics that create and use wireless signals are too large to be used within individual microchips successfully. The research project, which involves four universities in the UK and a university and research centre in Belgium and France, will look at ways of producing microwave energy on a small scale by firing electrons into magnetic fields produced in semiconductors that are only a few atoms wide and are layered with magnets. The process, called inverse electron spin resonance, uses the magnetic field to deflect electrons and to modify their magnetic

224

direction. This creates oscillations of the electrons which makes them produce microwave energy. This can then be used to broadcast electric signals in free space without the weakening caused by wires.

We can only go so far in getting more power from silicon chips by shrinking their components — conventional technology is already reaching the physical limits of materials it uses, such as copper wiring, and its evolution will come to a halt.“ But if this research is successful, it could make computers with wireless semi-conductors a possibility within five or ten years of the end of the project. Then computers could be made anything from 200 to 500 times quicker and still be the same size; This research may also improve the accuracy and speed of medical diagnostics by gathering data from health monitoring sensors. The microwave emitters are small enough to be integrated on portable biological sensors which feed information out on faulty biological processes. The research is not only practical, but beautiful in its theoretical simplicity, which is one of the big attractions for the physicists working on it; The project is the only one which aims to create wireless emitters and receivers that fit on semiconductor wafers, where individual devices are one ten thousandth of a millimetre in size. It will also allow the creation of integrated circuits which will still continue to work properly even if some of its connections fail — the system can be programmed to reroute itself so that it can continue working. At present a failure in a connecting wire can put an integrated circuit out of action. In the manufacture of today’s integrated circuits there is no room for error, and so anufactui ers must spend large amounts of money to build dust-free clean rooms. The advantage of the new more flexible system is that only 95% or so of the electronic components would need to work for the chip to work properly. Such chips would be many times cheaper to produce.

Posted by Nano News July, 10, 2006

II. Finish the following phrases:

1.Of this research is successful … .

2.The research is not only practical … .

3.The advantage of the new more flexible system is … .

Translate the sentences in writing.

III. Answer the following questions.

1. Why are wireless systems so important?

225

2.How will microware energy on a small scale be produced?

3.How will then computers be changed?

4.At present a failure in a connecting wire cannot put an integrated circuit out of action, can it?

5.How can this failure be avoided?

IV. Comment on the title of the article.

unit IV

I. Read the text looking for the information about ferroelectric polarization and how it influences an electrical field.

Faster, lighter computers possible with nanotechnology

Smaller, lighter computers and an end to worries about electrical failures sending hours of onscreen work into an inaccessible limbo mark the potential result of Argonne research on tiny ferroelectric crystals.

"Tiny" means billionths of a meter, or about 1/5OOth the width of a human hair. These nanomaterials behave differently than their larger bulk counterparts. Argonne researchers have learned that they are more chemically reactive, exhibit new electronic properties and can be used to create materials that are stronger, tougher and more resistant to friction and wear than bulk materials.

Improved nano-engineered ferroelectric crystals could realize a 50-year- old dream of creating nonvolatile random access memory (NVRAM). The first fruits of it can be seen in Sony's PlayStation 2 and in smart cards now in use in Brazil, China and Japan. A simple wave of a smart card identifies personnel or pays for gas or public transportation.

Computing applications

RAM – random access memory – is used when someone enters information or gives a command to the computer. It can be written to as well as read but – with standard commercial technology – holds its content only while powered by electricity.

Argonne materials scientists have created and are studying nanoscale crystals of ferroelectric materials that can be altered by an electrical field and retain any changes.

226

Ferroelectric materials – so called, because they behave similarly to ferromagnetic materials even though they don't generally contain iron – consist of crystals whose low symmetry causes spontaneous electrical polarization along one or more of their axes. The application of voltage can change this polarity. Ferroelectric crystals can also change mechanical to electrical energythe piezoelectric effect - or electrical energy to optical effects.

A strong external electrical field can reverse the plus and minus poles of ferroelectric polarization. The crystals hold their orientation until forced to change by another applied electric field. Thus, they can be coded as binary memory, representing "zero" in one orientation and "one" in the other.

Because the crystals do not revert spontaneously, RAM made with them would not be erased should there be a power failure. Laptop computers would no longer need back-up batteries, permitting them to be made still smaller and lighter. There would be a similar impact on cell phones.

Achieving such permanence is a long-standing dream of the computer industry.

"Companies such as AT&T, Ford, IBM, RCA and Westinghouse Electric made serious efforts to develop non-volatile RAMs in the 1950s, but couldn't achieve commercial use," said Argonne researcher Orlando Auciello. "Back then, NVRAMs were based on expensive ferroelectric single crystals, which required substantial voltage to switch their polarity. This, and cross talk inherent in the then recently devised row matrix address concept, made them impractical.

"Working on the nanoscale changes this," said Auciello. "It means higher density memories with faster speeds and megabyte (the amount of memory needed to store one million characters of information) - or even gigabyte (one billion bytes) - capacity. It's not clear how soon such capacity will be available, but competition is heavy, stakes are high, and some companies claim they will have the first fruits of this research within two years."

II. Find the text English equivalents to the following Russian words and word combinations. Read them correctly and memorize them.

в реальном времени

недоступный

крошечный

кристаллический диэлектрик

227

проявлять свойства

сопротивляться трению и износу

усовершенствованный

воплотить в жизнь

энергонезависимое запоминающее устройство

снабжаться электричеством

измениться под влиянием электрического поля

сохранять изменения

стихийная электрическая поляризация

менять направление

нуждаться в батарейной поддержке

III. Comment on the following statement of the author «Achieving such permanence is a long – standing dream of the computer industry».

IV. Answer the following questions:

1.Why is the creation of nonvolatile random access memory so important?

2.What are the possibilities of ferroelectric materials?

3.Why does the author think that stakes are high? Prove it.

V. Give summary of the article.

unit V

I. Read the text trying to understand the title of the article.

Closeness breeds material changes

Such proximity effects – changes in material behavior because the materials are so close -show up in giant magneto-resistance, a phenomenon discovered in 1988 and used in computer hard drives. Tiny magnetic bits are hard to read individually, but interleaved nanolayers of cobalt, copper, iron and chromium show substantial changes in resistance in magnetic fields because the layers are so close together. IBM and the magnetic recording industry have used this to create ultrasensitive hard-drive read mechanisms. "The nano-

228

community looks at a wide range of phenomena," said Sam Bader, Argonne senior physicist and coordinator of a new research initiative in nanomagnetic research that DOE recently approved for funding at a rate of $1.2 million a year. "It includes atoms, molecules and small clusters, and carries forward some existing technologies – such as semiconductors – by understanding bulk materials from a micro-structural view.

"We want to know how properties change at the smaller scales and are finding new effects, some of which are commercially viable. Nanoscience draws some of its importance from how quickly we've been able to turn these into technological applications."

The nanomagnetism initiative provides an interdisciplinary framework to help stage the next advance in complex materials research. It takes a broad approach, working with materials that fall from around one micron (one millionth of a meter) in size to less than 10 nanometers. As the scale decreases, the dominant physics changes, and new materials, properties and applications emerge.

Bader suggested that the computer world might one day be based in magnetic properties instead of electrical. This might make it possible to build computers with architectures that could be restructured depending on the task of the moment. The same machine could be configured like a Macintosh for tasks that a Mac operating system performs best and like a PC when Windows OS is preferable.

Also possible could be magnetic configurations that would not be limited by binary logic, making them more like the human brain. "This is far away, but promising," Bader said.

Studies on the nanoscale could lead to better bulk magnets and more efficient motors with consequent savings in the use of fossil fuels. It may also become possible to incorporate magnetic molecules in polymers, creating plastics that could be used where traditional magnets cannot, for example in certain corrosive environments.

II. Give Russian equivalents to the following English words and work combinations. Read them correctly and memorize them:

proximity effect

magneto – resistance

tiny magnetic bits

229