Photonics Center NSF REU and RET INM
           What is a nanometer?
    • Scale of measure to the -9 power
    • Fingernails grow at 1 nm/second
    • Cut a bacterium 1000x
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 Photonics Center NSF REU and RET INM
                         What is a nanometer?
       •  10-9 meters
       •  One billion nanometers in a meter
       •  One million times smaller than the head of a pin
       •  A thousand times smaller than a bacterium
       •  10 Hydrogen atoms lined up
       •  A sugar molecule
       •  Your fingernails grow at 1 nm/second: here’s a lab 
          experiment to try: 
          http://neurodojo.blogspot.com/2012/03/nano-scale-fing
          ernails-and-
          using.html 
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 Photonics Center NSF REU and RET INM
     How can we compare that to objects we 
                                    can see
      •  An atom is 0.1 to 0.5 nm in diameter
      •  DNA molecules are 2.5 nm wide
      •  Virus is about 100 nm wide, bacterium 1000 nm 
      •  Width of human hair – 100,000 nm
      •  Head of a pin – a million nanometers wide
      •  Adult male 2 meters (6 ft. 5 inches) is 2 billion 
         nanometers tall 
      •  Source:http
         ://nanosense.sri.com/activities/sizematters/sizeandscale/
         SM_Lesson2Student.pdf 
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 Photonics Center NSF REU and RET INM
                           Relative Sizes
      •  Imagine an ant (2 – 3 cm) compared to you, an ant is 
         about 1000x smaller than you
      •  Imagine an ant compared to an amoeba (1 um), the 
         amoeba is 1000x smaller than the ant
      •  A nanometer is 1000x smaller than an amoeba
      •  A person would have to shrink themselves down by a 
         factor of 1000 three times to be the size of a nanometer
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 Photonics Center NSF REU and RET INM
        What is Nanotechnology?
    • Making things to nanoscale
    • Technology using science to solve 
      problems
    • Technology with smallest feature sizes of 
      10 nm
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