::Have Fun!::: June 20 to 25, 2011 - Ekaterinburg, Russia - 19th International Symposium on Nanostructures

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The annual International Symposium on Nanostructures is chaired by two Nobel Prize laureates — Professor Zh. Alferov and Professor L. Esaki, and traditionally organized by Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute of RAS and St Petersburg Academic University — Nanotechnology Research and Education Centre of the RAS (St Petersburg Academic University), which are pioneering in many directions of this impetuously developing area. The Symposium was launched in 1993 by its Co-Chairs. It was one of the first in the area, which has become one of the leading in the modern physics and technology. The forthcoming Symposium will be organized together with the Institute of Metal Physics of the Ural Branch of the RAS in Ekaterinburg.

The 19th Symposium focuses on the newest achievements in physics, technology and applications of solid state and life nanostructures, and it aims at bringing together various scientific groups actively working in these very important directions. The Symposium scientific program will cover a wide spectrum of physical phenomena, both basic and applied, as well as the technological aspects related to nanostructures.

The Symposium will be held from June 20 to June 25, 2011 in the picturesque outskirts of Ekaterinburg at the Lenevka sanatorium which is located in the heart of the Middle Urals, on the bank of Lenevskii Lake, 115 km from the city of Ekaterinburg, and 35 km from the city of Nizhny Tagil. The Opening plenary session will be held at the Institute of Metal Physics of the Ural Branch of the RAS in Ekaterinburg.

Source : www.ioffe.ru

WHAT IS NANOSTRUCTURES?

Interest in nanotechnology is growing rapidly. Now it is possible to arrange atoms into structures that are only a few nanometers in size. A nanometer is about four atom diameters or 1 / 50 000 of a human hair. (Your fingernails grew about a nanometer while reading this.) A particularly attractive goal is the self-assembly of nanostructures, which produces large amounts of artificial materials with new properties. In order to connect nanostructures to the more familiar world of microstructures and microelectronics, one wants to to build up larger assemblies by guided self-assembly.

Some of these exotic nanostructures have made it already onto our desktops. Magnetic nanolayers exhibit the effect of "giant magnetoresistance" (GMR), which makes them currently the best material for reading heads of hard disks. Arrays of nanowires may play a crucial role in future computers: The main speed limitation will not be the switching time of a transistor, but the time that the signals travel along the wires (see J. Birnbaum and R. S. Williams, Physics Today, January 2000, p. 38).

The picture below illustrates the potential of nano-devices for data storage. On the left are images of two familiar data storage media, the CD-ROM and the DVD. On the right is a self-assembled memory at a silicon surface that is formed by depositing a small amount of gold. It looks like a CD, except that the length scale is in nanometers, not micrometers. The corresponding storage density is a million times higher. The surface formats itself into atomically-perfect stripes (red) with extra atoms on top (white). These atoms are neatly lined up at well-defined sites along the stripes, but occupy only about half of them. It is possible to use the presence of an atom to store a 1, and the absence to store a 0. The ultimate goal would be to build a data storage medium that needs only a single atom per bit. The big question is how to write and read such bits efficiently.