Nanomaterials
Exploring nanomaterials with antimatter
Positronium also survives for a while inside nanomaterials. Nanomaterials are materials that are modified at the atomic level, atom by atom, to give them useful properties at the human scale.
Nanomaterials are becoming more and more important in medicine, agriculture, and other aspects of our daily lives.
Nanomaterials have been modified at the atomic level, but electrons and positrons are much smaller than atoms. Even the positronium “atomoid” is a lot smaller than a real atom, so positronium is an excellent tool to use to probe nanomaterials.
What “nano-” means
The prefix “nano-“ is often used in everyday speech to mean “very small”, but in fact it has a specific scientific meaning.
“Nano-” refers to a length of 10-9 metres, or one millionth of a millimetre. Nanotechnology is technology that works at this scale; nanomaterials are materials that have been modified at this scale.
