Glossary

The prefix nano means a billionth (10 ^–9 ), and a nanometer (nm) is a billionth of a meter (10 ^–9 m).

The challenge of developing nanomaterials was launched in 1959 by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman at the meeting of the American Physical Society on December 29, 1959: "there is plenty of room at the bottom of the scale... when we have some control over the arrangement of atoms on a small scale, we will discover that matter has enormously more extensive properties, and that with them we can achieve many more things".

Specific surface area is the total surface area of the particle normalized by mass. Thus, a nanoparticle 10 nm in diameter will have a specific surface area 10 times greater than a 300 nm nanoparticle of equal mass. Studies...