Transcript for Paul Alivisatos Interview - What is nanoscience?

My research has been in the area of nanocrystals,

studying very small crystals, which are so small that their properties depend on the size.

One way you can understand that is if you go to the library...

and look up the properties of matter,

you would find for example gold has a melting temperature – it’s in a book –

but if you make a very tine gold particle,

actually its melting temperature would start to depend on size,

as would many other physical properties.

So a lot of my research has been involved in making very small crystals,

where you could count the number of atoms in the crystal,

and looking at their physical properties and chemical properties...

...as a function of the number of atoms and their size.

So that’s my own personal area of research.

It connects to the field of nanoscience as well,

but that’s a broader field, with many different aspects to it. Nanoscience really involves...

...learning how to control matter on a very small length scale in general,

not just the tiny crystals but all different kinds of matter.

That’s a very fundamental area of science, because in the past,

we didn’t know how to control matter on that scale,

and now that we can, we can build new things that weren’t possible before.