| Abstract: |
Nanotechnology provides great opportunities for the development of advanced devices with enormous quality-of-life and economic benefits, with applications ranging from biomedical implantable actuators to environmental toxin detectors to infrastructural remote sensors. Enabling these applications is the fact that nano-scale mechanical properties of materials are often radically different from those of their bulk or macro-scale counterparts. Hence, a critical requirement for the commercial innovation and manufacturing of these devices is the parallel development of nanomechanical measurements to determine the elastic, plastic, viscous, and fracture properties of materials, and local states of deformation and stress, in quantitative detail and with nanometer spatial resolution. Nanomechanical measurements research is an exciting multi-disciplinary field at the intersection of mechanics, physics, and chemistry: New nanomechanical measurements not only reveal fundamental phenomena at the nano-scale but also have direct application in nanotechnology. |
