A leading nanotechnology scientist, Mike Kelly, a professor at the Center for Advanced Photonics and Electronics at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, has claimed, in a paper published in the journal Nanotechnology, that there is a limit to how small nanotechnology materials can be mass produced. Kelly said that structures with a diameter of three nanometers or less cannot be mass produced using a top-down approach. The paper raises questions over a billion-dollar industry that hopes the latest technology developed in the laboratory can make the transition to a manufactured product on the market. Nanotechnologies need to have low-cost, high-volume manufacturability, while also being highly reproducible within a pre-specified limit, something Kelly says can’t happen below the three-nanometer size. His statistical evaluation showed that at this scale the properties of the material will vary to such an extent that the material cannot function to its full capacity. Kelly says: “If I am wrong, and a counterexample to my theorem is provided, many scientists would be more secure in their continued working, and that is good for science. If more work is devoted to the hard problem of understanding just what can be manufactured and how, at the expense of more studies of things that cannot be manufactured under the conditions of the present theorem, then that too is good for science and for technology.” The article can be viewed online at the link below.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-limit-nanotechnology-mass-production.html