Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
1
Nanotechnology and the Future
of Dentistry
K. Subramani,
1
and W. Ahmed
2
1
Department of Orthodontics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA
2
Institute of Nanotechnology and Bioengineering, School of Computing, Engineering
and Physical Sciences, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK
CONTENTS
1.1
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................1
1.2
Nanotechnology Approaches................................................................................................................2
1.3
Nanotechnology to Nanomanufacturing ................................................................................................3
1.3.1
Top-Down Approach ..................................................................................................... 4
1.3.2
Bottom-Up Approach ................................................................................................... 6
1.4
Nanodentistry ...................................................................................................................................10
1.5
Future Directions and Conclusions .....................................................................................................14
References ..............................................................................................................................................14
1.1
INTRODUCTION
Although nanotechnology has been around since the beginning of time, the discovery of nanotechnol-
ogy has been widely attributed to the American Physicist and Nobel Laureate Dr. Richard Phillips
Feynman
[1]
who presented a paper called
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
in December 29, 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society meeting at California
Institute of Technology. Feynman talked about the storage of information on a very small scale, writ-
ing and reading in atoms, about miniaturization of the computer, building tiny machines, tiny facto-
ries, and electronic circuits with atoms. He stated that “In the year 2000, when they look back at this
age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this
direction.” However, he did not specifically use the term “nanotechnology.” The first use of the word
“nanotechnology” has been attributed to Taniguchi
[2]
in a paper published in 1974 “On the Basic
Concept of NanoTechnology.” Dr. K. Eric Drexler, an MIT graduate, later took Feynman's concept
of a billion tiny factories and added the idea that they could make more copies of themselves, via
