Comment from Christian Joachim,
CEMES/CNRS, 29 Rue J. Marvig, BP 94347, 31055
Toulouse Cedex, France
on The Mysteries at the Nanoscale

Here is a future which can be called nanoscience
because the subject of the experiment is no more a
material but a single individual molecule.

Toulouse, le 11 Octobre 2005

Dear Editor,

Thanks for communicating the reaction of Pr. G. J. Salamo to my paper ¹. I am very sorry to have disturbed the social club of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Of course material science is fascinating for the new devices and for their new properties invented or to be discovered. But do we have to invent a new name for those research activities? As mentioned ¹, they result from inventions of new instruments and techniques which appear at the beginning to the middle of the twentieth century: X-rays diffractometer, electron microscopy, epitaxy, self assembly of molecular monolayer, e-beam lithography, just to name a few.

Let us imagine that G. Bining and H. Rohrer had not invented the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) in 1982 and D. Eigler not discovered single atom manipulation in 1991. Material science will continue to go on and the control of materials at the atomic scale will continue using all the characterisation tools mentioned above. Even atomic and molecular monolayer characterisations would be practiced using for example razing X-Rays facilities and the razing e-beam instrumentation would have been pushed further. This would be nurturing “technologies for future electronic, opto-electronic and electromechanical devices” as quoted by Pr. Salamo together with certainly very interesting science resulting. In the 80’s many solid state physicists where calling this science “mesocopic physics”, a very good terminology according to the L. de Broglie classification ¹.

As observers or participants, we have the chance to be at a breaking point in the history of science and technology: the invention of a new instrument, the STM and the growing of a new technique atomic and molecular manipulation, one at a time. Thanks for Pr. Salamo appreciation, “the manipulation of atoms and molecule is beautifully accomplished”. Atomic and molecular manipulation may be “a miracle” as written by Pr. Salamo. But it is a commercial miracle. One can buy on the market LT UHV STM which guaranty atom by atom manipulation. Two companies are selling those products. There is no mystery here, only technology that scientists and engineers are pushing again and again to the limits for the benefit of both. Like any such breaking point in history, we cannot appreciate on the spot what will come after: only a craft for laboratory (as implicitly expressed in his paper by Pr. Salamo) or a full technological revolution as predicted by others. But we do appreciate that playing with a single molecule, exploring intramolecular behaviours inside a single and always the same molecule open new scientific avenues. Here is a future which can be called nanoscience because the subject of the experiment is no more a material but a single individual molecule.

To finish with, a word about self-assembly. There is no mystery about self-assembly, this is physics and chemistry. In many books, the confusion is that self-assembly is loosely related to life. Then, come such strange sentence like ”new mysterious behaviours” in the Pr. Salamo comments. Optical, electrical mechanical properties coming from nano materials are not unusual intrinsically, there are unusual compared to the properties of previous materials. This doesn’t means that they are mysterious nor that they are resulting from a new science. Another way of thinking is open by atom and molecular manipulation: designing, fabricating (synthesizing) unimolecular machine integrating all the functionality inside the same molecule (large or small). There is no need to assemble (or self assemble) a material to fabricate a device or a machine. What are the laws of Nature which are forcing us for doing so? Staying at the bottom, avoiding the bottom-up approach is a difficult problem of communication: how to exchange information, energy order with a single molecule. This is a real difficult technical problem for scientists and engineers. Here is Nanoscience and certainly not in a social self assembly between material science and mesoscopic physics.

C. Joachim

¹ C. Joachim, Nature Material, 4, 107 (2005)

This is a communication between Gregory J. Salamo (Arkansas, USA) and Christian Joachim (CNRS, France) which took place three years ago. It was invited for an article category entitled “Nano Opinion", to be published with the journal launch of Nanoscale Research Letters (NRL). However, this article category was not launched with NRL when the journal was finally launched with Springer half a year later. Today, I accidentally opened the two submissions and found both still worthy of a bunch to share. Therefore, I would like to share them with you as two blog posts. Here, first come Gregory Salamo’s:

The Mysteries at the Nanoscale
Gregory J. Salamo
Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701, USA

Today many of these mysteries lie at the nanoscale and it is the pursuit and discovery of these mysteries, and the search to the answers to these mysteries, that is rightfully the term nanoscience.

Earlier this year Dr. Christian Joachim wrote an article ¹ in Nature titled “To be nano or not to be nano?” In his article Dr. Joachim argues that the term nanoscience is currently used far more widely then it should be, causing confusion at funding agencies and within the general pubic and even scientific community. From his point of view, “nanoscience should be reserved solely for the study of a single atom or a single molecule, that is, one entity at a time and not for groups of such entities where statistics or interactions between them come into play. From his perspective, the result of this misapplication of the term is that “the craft of atomic and molecular manipulations, which is practiced only by a few dozen groups around the world, often serves as a pretext for thousands of other labs to be financially supported on the same track.” Certainly, one need only look at the research achievements of Dr. Joachim to understand the merit of this craft. The manipulation of atoms and molecules is beautifully accomplished using scanning tunneling microscopy STM), providing perspective for Dr. Joachim’s point of view.

However, not withstanding the miracle of atom and molecule manipulations by a STM tip, I would like to offer a different perspective to the meaning of the terms nanoscience and nanotechnology. One that is much more inclusive than Dr. Joachim suggests. Many of us were excited and driven to science and engineering careers by the natural investigative nature of the subjects. Consequently those of us who passionately pursue science and engineering understand the excitement we experience when, with relentless step-by-step pursuit, we are the first to uncover the answer to a scientific mystery. In these endeavors, we have learned that there is no substitute to experiencing these emotions first hand. Today many of these mysteries lie at the nanoscale and it is the pursuit and discovery of these mysteries, and the search to the answers to these mysteries, that is rightfully the term nanoscience.

Richard Feynman, in a 1959 talk entitled “There’s Room at the Bottom,” with the usual clarity of his famous “Lectures in Physics”, challenged physicists to explore the field we now call nanotechnology. His vision was the control of materials on the atomic scale, a key technology for future electronic, optoelectronic and electromechanical devices. Many years later we have learned how to pattern devices on the sub-micron scale, devices which form the basis of all modern electronics that in turn makes possible much of our information economy. Yet even given the amazing electronics entry into the submicron scale that we see today in numerous products, we are only now starting to realize Feynman’s original fundamental idea of a bottomup technology. With this realization will come a further reduction in the size of semiconductor devices that will lead to faster, smaller computers, denser information storage, numerous breakthroughs in biology and medicine and along with them, we may expect new mysteries not yet even imagined.

One would not have to know Richard Feynman personally to realize that it was exactly the discovery of these mysteries and their understanding that characterized his challenge. Building nanostructures from the bottom-up, by any means, uncovering and understanding their mysterious behavior and utilizing that behavior for our betterment, best describes the terms nanoscience and nanotechnology. It is not simply the study of a single atom or a single molecule – very far from it. In fact, it is perhaps surprising that in spite of the fact that we have studied atoms and molecules for such a long time that our fundamental understanding of material science at the nanoscale is still in its infancy. The reason is that a new door in science and technology is opening, based on the recently developed ability to see and organize matter on the nanoscale. It is just this fact that tells us that nanoscale is not just another step toward miniaturization, but an era in new mysterious behaviors that we can now see. Why a certain shape, a certain color, a certain organization? Why are the optical, electrical, mechanical properties so unusual? Can they be understood, predicted, or even tailored? For example, gold or semiconductor particles have a color that dramatically depends on size crossing the entire visible spectrum. In addition to color, another fundamental mystery of nanoscience is that nanostructures self-assemble. That is, they build themselves from the bottom up. Is the underlying science of self-assembly connected to Nature’s self assembly? Can we encourage Nature to self-assemble what we prefer? What wonderful mysterious and the challenge to solve them lie ahead.

While as it is with all things, some scientists and engineers will misuse the words nanoscience and nanotechnology, for the most part the scientific and engineering community is attracted by the mysteries “to be nano”.

Comment from Christian Joachims

Reference:
¹ C. Joachim, Nature Materials 4, 107 (2005).

For most of scientists and engineers, publishing in academic journals and presenting at professional conferences are the two most dominant outlets for sharing research with colleagues. The advantages of conference presentations are obvious. Often very colorful, offering face-to-face communication, conference presentations can instantly capture an audience’s attention. The disadvantages of conference presentations, on the other hand, are their short lifetime and limited audience. In most cases, only conference attendees can enjoy presentation materials, and only during a conference. While many of today’s conferences have their own websites, the majority of conference websites provide only limited content: the titles of presentations and the names of presenters, often without even an abstract.

While organizations are increasingly beginning to provide presentation materials online post-conference, such materials often come and go quickly. Current conference organizing systems have not proved suitable in that they fail to give presentations credit for potential long-term impact. Thus, conference presenters are left to credit their own presentations by listing them in their curriculum vitae or by referring to them in journal publications. Unfortunately, such presentation materials, even though cited, are in most cases no longer available for review.

OAtube Nanotechnology, the first ever video journal indexed and/or abstracted in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), is founded on the premise that many conference presentations do have long-term impact, being the sources for future discovery. Thus, the oatube journal aims to archive them in a new form. OAtube Nanotechnology is a new kind of scientific journal, a royal representative of conference presentations containing journal-style citation information about presentations as a resource for other researchers. Authors keep the copyright of their journal articles. This new kind of journal only provides an open-access approach for conference presentations to reach the widest possible audience through the Internet.

Support OAtube be cool.

Yes, open access (OA) is about the FORM of scientific delivery, referring to free online availability of digital scientific contents (mainly research journals) for EVERYONE. Do we really mean EVERYONE here? Including the general public? Please notice, the audiences of the traditional subscription-based journals are other researchers. Only some of them, within an immediate academic circle, are willing to and able to pay the subscription for accessing the research articles. Is OA really serious about delivering scientific contents to the widest possible audiences? We’ve heard it, that is EVERYONE!

Communicating science to the public is a new task for scientific journals. It does require an extension of the OA movement from form to content. Hi, we have new audiences here! OA journals shouldn’t simply throw the same scientific content to the new audience; an effort is needed to present the content in a different way.

OA journals from PLOS require submissions of interest to scientists outside the field. Although this is good, it’s not enough because the content remains in the realm of the scientific community. Of course, we don’t expect the general public to absorb all of the content in scientific journals. In fact, even as experts in the field, we don’t always grasp every point in a research article. Nature and Science, two top-notched scientific journals, subscription-based though, do require the conclusions or abstracts of their publications to address the general public at a basic comprehensive level. So, should the authors of OA journals take the same obligation to broadcast science to the general public? As a reminder, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) does require its funded researches to outreach the public for a broader impact. Should NSF apply a similar Public Access Policy as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) does? It certainly makes sense.

Perhaps the bar is set too high for all the OA journals? If we are serious about delivering science to the public through OA, we must start somewhere. Therefore, as the Editor-in-Chief of a Springer OA journal, Nanoscale Research Letters, I’m hereby calling for submissions that address public interests in the abstract, introduction or conclusion, especially for a review-type submission. NRL is the first major publisher of nanotechnology OA journal. It provides an interdisciplinary forum for communication of scientific and technological advances in the creation and use of objects at the nanometer scale. Jan Velterop, one of the most prominent figures of the OA community, joined Springer as its OA director in 2005. Thereafter, I proposed NRL to Springer. I have devoted my efforts as the NRL Editor-in-Chief from its launch in the middle of 2006. While all the NRL articles are freely available online for EVERYONE, I have to admit, the journal content significantly lacks interests for the general public. I accepted the criticism received while promoting the journal, “Open Access is just a game inside the immediate academic circle”. To encourage more NRL submissions that addresses the public interests, any submission that specifies “Open Access Day" in the message to NRL editors and meets the standard, the publication fee of $950 per article will be voluntary for submissions received in 2008.

OK, I believe I addressed all of the 4 key points raised to enter the synchroblogging competition in the first Open Access Day. To summarize:

• Why does Open Access matter to you?
This is my opportunity to better serve the scientific community and the general public.
• How did you first become aware of it?
I can’t remember exactly. I gained awareness at the beginning of 2005. Ever since, I started my efforts to launch an OA journal on nanotechnology.
• Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?
Is this a question? I hate to repeat what others have said and would say. Why not open-access to scientific and medical research? This is a question.
• What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?
I have a well-visited blog in Chinese, to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access. Besides publishing with OA journals, refereeing for OA journals, using OA articles, and broadcasting the OA movement, I hope that more scientists realize the necessity for appropriate scientific contents for open access. This is about how we are going to write manuscripts for OA journals.

- Zhiming M. Wang, synchroblogging at the first open access day (October 14, 2008)