Making The Paper

摘要

Nanotechnology promises to transform industries as diverse as biomedicine, computing and optics, but crafting tiny components has proved challenging. One difficulty has been finding a low-cost, durable means of moulding features smaller than 100 nanometres into the materials currently used in the manufacture of devices such as next-generation DVDs and computer chips. Silicon-based moulds used to make the latter are brittle and short-lived, and although metals would offer stronger moulds, their grains are too large to be useful at the nanoscale.