Feynman, biominerals and graphene – Basic aspects of nanoscience

This article is about writing small. Inspired by R.P. Feynman’s legendary talk There’s plenty of room at the bottom, we recapitulate his famous Gedanken experiment of condensing a lot of useful information on the head of a pin [see Feynman R, J. MEMS 1 (1992) 60]. These considerations will familiarize us with the length scales for a future downsizing of technological components, and they allow for some speculations about ultimate physical or chemical limits of the corresponding nanodevices. Furthermore we will analyze the nanotechnological capabilities of Mother Nature in the case of magnetotactic bacteria, and briefly sketch the cornerstones of the rapidly growing field of biomineralization, which might open up a new science of complex functional nanomaterials in the near future. Finally we describe a general scheme to shrink integrated microelectronic circuits towards the very size limits of nanotechnology.