Nanotechnology

   CPUs - October 15, 2007, Intel announced the development of a new prototype processor, containing the smallest structural element size of approximately 45 nm. In the future the company intends to reach the size of structural elements to 5 nm. The main competitor to Intel, the company AMD, also long been used for the production of its processors nanotechnological processes, developed jointly with IBM. A characteristic difference from the Intel hardware is the use of an additional insulating layer of SOI, which prevents leakage current due to additional insulation structures, forming a transistor. Already have working samples of processors with transistors of 32 nm and prototypes at 22 nm.

   Hard drive - in 2007, Peter Grünberg and Albert Fert won the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery of GMR-effect, enabling users to record data on hard drives with an atomic density of information.

   Scanning probe microscope - a microscope of high resolution, based on the interaction of the cantilever tip (probe) with the surface of the sample. Usually, the interaction is understood the attraction or repulsion of the cantilever from the surface because of van der Waals forces. But by using special cantilevers can be studied electrical and magnetic properties of the surface. SPM can explore both conductive and non-conductive surface, even through a layer of liquid, which makes working with organic molecules (DNA). The spatial resolution of scanning probe microscopes depends on the characteristics of the probe. Resolution reaches atomic horizontally and substantially exceeds the vertical.

   Antenna-oscillator - February 9, 2005 in the laboratory at Boston University received the antenna-oscillator size about 1 micron. This device consists of 5000 million atoms and can oscillate with a frequency of 1.49 gigahertz, which allow you to send with it huge amounts of information.

   Plasmons - collective oscillations of free electrons in the metal. A characteristic feature of the excitation of plasmons can be considered a so-called plasmon resonance, first predicted by Mie at the beginning of XX century. The wavelength of the plasmon resonance, for example, spherical silver particles with a diameter of 50 nm is about 400 nm, which indicates the possibility of registration of nanoparticles beyond the borders of the diffraction limit (wavelength much larger than the size of particles). At the beginning of 2000, thanks to rapid advances in technology of nanoscale particles, an impetus to the development of a new field of nanotechnology - Nanoplasmonics. It was possible to transmit electromagnetic radiation along a chain of metallic nanoparticles with the excitation of plasmon oscillations.