Welcome to the future of materials science, where tiny tech brings about big change!
Nanoengineering is the science of creating materials at atomic scale. It holds the key to solving some of the world's biggest challenges, from increasing computing power to harnessing energy more efficiently.
By engineering materials on a nanoscale – a scale undetectable to the human eye, placing atoms precisely 20nm apart, 3000 times smaller than the width of your hair – we can start to unlock characteristics we've never seen in materials before. This is because atoms behave differently at the nanoscale. They interact differently with each other and have unique properties we can use.
Royal Society Summer Exhibition
By leveraging these new-found strengths and capabilities, we can improve devices at an atomic scale and start to build the materials that will enable game-changing technologies. Technologies like quantum computing – which has the power to process so much data at one time that it could help us create medicine crafted to a person's individual needs – incredibly accurate weather forecasting, or a world with accident-free driverless cars.
Be a nanoscale pioneer!
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Be an atom!
Start by joining us on a VR experience, where you're shrunk down to atomic scale before being implanted into materials with atomic precision. Experience what it's like to be 100,000,000 smaller than a ping pong ball and be one of the first in the world to know what it feels like to be implanted into a material.
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Be the scientist!
Step into the shoes of our team of world-leading engineers and create the perfect nanoscaled material, before watching your experiment brought to life on our giant light cube simulation.
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3. Be the analyst!
Get hands on by studying a material without seeing it, and watching our atomic force microscopy (AFM), taken straight out of our lab, characterise new materials – as well as looking at why we wear gloves in the lab (hint; your fingers aren't as clean as you may think!).
Work Side By Side With World Leaders
Learn from a team which has been working for years at the forefront of nano-engineering.
A team which:
Has created the world's purest silicon – the critical 'brick' needed to construct a silicon-based quantum computer
Uses equipment that can't be found anywhere else in the world, like P-NAME, an ion implantation tool that can 'dope' materials to one ion with 20 nanometre accuracy
Contains experts in atomic force microscopy (AFM), a tool which uses a mechanism similar to a vinyl record player to characterise a material, atom by atom
Take Your Journey Home
Looking to extend your adventure into nanoscale advanced materials? Check out the links on this page as well as our NAME @ home section for microscope sheets and crystal kits.
Note: NAME is a EPSRC programme grant (EP/V001914/1) evolving the design and delivery of functionality on demand at the nanoscale within advanced materials. NAME brings together advanced capability from three partner institutions to unlock new areas of advanced materials research which will directly lead to a new generation of highly optimised technologies.