Nanotechnology bears the promise of engineering at an atomic scale--of assembling atoms in arrangements that are completely unnatural, thereby creating materials with properties that have never been seen before. This may sound like science fiction, but it has been going on for more than 30 years, since the invention of Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE). MBE provides a way of growing a block of material one sheet of atoms at a time. By mixing different types of atoms in various combinations, it is possible to "tune" the properties of the resulting material. For example, the laser diode in your CD player is probably made from silicon. It shines a particular wavelength of light based on the energy gap between the conduction and valence bands in silicon. That same laser diode could be "tuned" to emit a different wavelength by building it with a new material engineered to have a different band gap.

MBE is just one technique for building materials on an atomic scale. Many other techniques are also under investigation, including dragging atoms via a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) tip, and Self-Assembled Monolayers (SAM).

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