{"id":266,"date":"2013-02-15T12:28:35","date_gmt":"2013-02-15T18:28:35","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2014-05-21T15:13:36","modified_gmt":"2014-05-21T20:13:36","slug":"nano-in-new-zealand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/?p=266","title":{"rendered":"Nano in New Zealand"},"content":{"rendered":"

G\u2019day! Greetings from Auckland, New Zealand. I\u2019m here attending the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology (AMN-6). As the name implies it has been a week of graphene, buckyballs, and nanotubes, biologically inspired surfaces, quantum effects, and self-assembled everything. While there were some talks on \u201ctop-down\u201d fabrication (like traditional lithography), most of the emphasis was on \u201cbottoms up\u201d: letting the physics of some process naturally create small structures. I saw the self-assembly of nanostructures using block copolymers of course, but also using the shear forces of spin coating, dewetting during evaporation, and deep reactive ion etching. One definitely gets one\u2019s quota of strange ideas at a conference like this.<\/p>\n

AMN always attracts Nobel Prize winners (I\u2019m not the only one who likes to come to New Zealand), and this year Roald Hoffmann<\/a> (Chemistry, 1981) gave a keynote speech and a public lecture. Both were excellent. The keynote looked at the use of the diamond anvil to put materials at pressures up to one million atmospheres (similar to the pressure at the center of the earth). At these pressures everything becomes a metal. His public lecture (at the Auckland Museum) was more philosophical, looking at the many tensions in chemistry. Some memorable quotes from that lecture:<\/p>\n

\u201cBeauty resides at the boundary between order and chaos.\u201d
\u201cChemistry is less in the business of discovery and more in the business of creation.\u201d
\u201cMy papers are written for the intelligent graduate student, and I have a lot of trouble getting them published as a result.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alas, many (most?) of the talks at this conference were aimed a little higher than the intelligent graduate student, and I couldn\u2019t follow quite a few of them. I enjoyed hearing Mike Kelly (University of Cambridge) complain that many of the ideas promoted by nanotechnologists were inherently non-manufacturable. \u201cManufacturability is the key gateway to everything. It should be our main focus.\u201d He was doubtful that any bottoms-up approach to fabrication could ever become manufacturable (the problem: defects). The few lithography talks (Richard Blaikie, Idriss Blakey, and a few others) were of course of interest to me, but the real value of a conference like this is to pull your head out of the details of your current problem domain and see a broad range of activities in nanoscience. For that, the conference has been a success.<\/p>\n

The last evening of the conference gave us the banquet. It being Valentine\u2019s day, the requested dress was described as \u201csmart, with a hint of romance.\u201d Unfortunately, I only packed \u201cdumb, with no chance of romance.\u201d But, since it was a nanotechnology conference, I wasn\u2019t out of place.<\/p>\n

When the last day of the conference rolled around on Friday, I decided to skip out. It is time to see the important landmarks of this beautiful country. Cheers!<\/p>\n

\"Chris<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

G\u2019day! Greetings from Auckland, New Zealand. I\u2019m here attending the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology (AMN-6). As the name implies it has been a week of graphene, buckyballs, and nanotubes, biologically inspired surfaces, quantum effects, and self-assembled everything. While there were some talks on \u201ctop-down\u201d fabrication (like traditional lithography), most of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":376,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions\/376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}