Think very small: from nanotubes to quantum dots, nanotechnology presents great opportunities for Indiana.

IN "THE PLACES THAT nature works," on a scale so small that even standard microscopes can't allow us to see, there's a looming building boom that may change the way we live our everyday lives.

That's the promise of nanotechnology, which is generally defined as new procedures and devices being built at less than 100 nanometers, each being one millionth of a millimeter. While it is difficult to imagine such a size, a DNA molecule has a diameter of about 2.5 nanometers and the diameter of a human hair is roughly 80,000 nanometers.

Although the concept of building at the nano scale has been discussed for decades, it's the possibility of such new products leaving the lab and being used in consumer and industrial products that has many people referring to such science as the next Industrial Revolution. And research being done in Indiana places the state in a promising position to manufacture the nanotubes, nanowires and quantum dots of the future.

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George B. Adams III, associate director for programs at the Network for Computational Nanotechnology and based at Purdue University, says Indiana has great potential to change our understanding of how such materials interact and how they can be used.

"We've only been able to look at this world for the past 25 years and there's a great deal out there we don't know," he says. However, Adams says Purdue is leading the exploration and discovery of this area through efforts like the network, which is a multi-university initiative funded by the National Science Foundation and charged with creating nanoHUB.org, a site where more than 300,000 nanotechnology simulations have taken place in the past year.

"Carbon nanotubes are an amazing new form of carbon," he says, citing examples of how they can be used to construct tiny structures with amazing strength or be grown on surfaces that can convert heat to electricity at high efficiency He says such uses may lead to painless needles that deliver drugs without causing pain or cars that can generate electricity from engine heat.

Other nano building blocks include nanowires that are so small and narrow that they are often called one-dimensional and quantum dots, excited electrons confined in all three spatial dimensions. Such unique properties may redefine the way we build computer circuits.

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However, Adams predicts the first major breakthroughs from nanotechnology will take place in advanced sensors that will be able to test and deliver vast quantities of data in everything from monitoring air quality to identifying proteins in a drop of blood.

"All of these are going to transform this century," Adams predicts and notes that much of the research is coming from Indiana. "We are in the epicenter," he says.

Birck Nanotechnology Center. A key ingredient for nanotechnology innovation is having access to facilities with "cleanrooms" that allow testing and development in environments where gravity has almost no effect and in still air, dust particles may take a year to settle to the floor.

One of the reasons that Indiana is a leader m nanotechnology research is just such a facility exists at Purdue University's Discovery Park. The Birck Nanotechnology Center was completed in 2005 at a cost of $58 million, of which $42 million was raised from three private donations. Today the 187,000-square-foot facility includes the Scifres Nanofabrication Laboratory, a 25,000-square-foot cleanroom that serves 145 faculty members and hundreds of graduate students doing work in science, engineering, agriculture, pharmacy and even liberal arts. The facility is "the epitome of a university-based research facility focusing on the growing discipline of nanotechnology," according to Mihail Roco, senior advisor for nanotechnology to the National Science Foundation.

Facility manager John Weaver says the center is a truly an interdisciplinary facility. "We have faculty and students from 34 schools and departments who are working collaboratively in the building, building on backgrounds in science, engineering, agriculture, technology and many other disciplines," he says. "The results of these collaborations are very dramatic, such as active biological devices using semiconductor technology. By putting people of various areas of expertise together, completely new avenues of research open up."

Evidence of that collaboration at the center is a steady stream of developments in nanotechnology that is being noticed around the world.

For example, this month a research team from Purdue is traveling to India to lead a workshop on how nanotechnology can address growing energy needs. In July, a group of researchers announced a breakthrough in using carbon nanotubes to print circuits on flexible plastic sheets while another reported progress in designing low-cost LED lights that could reduce electric consumption by 10 percent. Earlier in the summer, still another team announced work on a miniature refrigeration system that can fit inside laptop computers.

Midwest Institute for Nanoelectronics Discovery, But Indiana's research isn't limited to West Lafayette. More promising applications of nanotechnology are being studied in northern Indiana, where researchers at the University of Notre Dame are exploring ways to replace transistors on computer chips with nanodevices.

The Midwest Institute for Nanoelectronics Discovery (MIND) is a research consortium led by the university that seeks to discover and develop the next nanoscale logic device, which will be the basic building block of future computer technology. In layman's terms, the premise of such new technology is that the advances in computer power by making transistors smaller and smaller will soon reach their physical limitations due to problems with leakage of heat and electric current.

MIND hopes to solve that problem by linking experts in nanotechnology to develop a replacement for today's computer chips, perhaps by using nanometer-size magnetic switches or finding new ways to direct electrons based on the physics of electron tunneling. The institute is a collaboration with Purdue University, the University of Illinois, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Michigan, Argonne National Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and works in collaboration with the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative of the Semiconductor Research Corp.

When announcing the institute earlier this year, Notre Dame president Rev. John I. Jenkins noted the work is "a giant stride in the development of the technology of small things."

"It promises to move us past the limits currently imposed by the laws of physics and enable the building of advanced devices, circuits and systems that will be faster, more powerful and more compact than those that currently power our cell phones, computers and other electronic devices," he says.

"This is a tremendous opportunity for us to discover and shape the development of nanoelectronics and to make it happen here in the Midwest," says Alan Seabaugh, professor of electrical engineering at Notre Dame and director of MIND. Seabaugh has been working on nanoelectronics research since the 1986 and has been awarded more than 20 patents in the field.

"We are now in the research and development phase of the project," Seabaugh says. "This means working out the device physics, developing fabrication processes, building and testing prototypes and figuring out how to configure these devices in systems. This is the time when discoveries are made."

Seabaugh's work is being supported by some old-fashioned bricks and mortar construction currently under way at the university. A $69.4 million investment in the new Stinson-Remick Hall will house MIND and the Notre Dame Energy Center, providing a research area that includes a 10,000-square-foot cleanroom and is designed to reduce almost all vibrations that can affect nanotechnology experiments.

Such work has local officials excited about the possibility of creating new jobs in the region and possibly even a new center for the computer industry of the future.

"From an economic development perspective, we see this as the most significant venture that the community has had the opportunity to pursue in the last 150 years," says Patrick McMahon, executive director of Project Future, a South Bend economic development organization eyeing new jobs from the research. "Given that we are talking about a trillion-dollar industry, if we can capture the spin-off aspects into local jobs and business activity, it could completely transform our local economy for years to come."

Indeed such investment in future technologies can reap large dividends, says Todd Vare, an intellectual property attorney with Barnes & Thornburg and co-chair of its new nanotechnology practice group. He expects breakthroughs in the science will lead to new ways to diagnose and treat disease, create new power sources, purify water and create new building materials.

Vare cites a National Science Foundation prediction that nanotechnology will be a $1 trillion industry by 2015 and notes that while venture capitalists invested $702 million in such startups last year, the federal government is set to spend more than twice that amount in 2009 for research efforts. "Nanotechnology thrives where research and development exists," Vare says, adding that Indiana is well-positioned to benefit from that research.

Although most of the nanotechnology work is still being done in the lab, some early research is already making its way to market.