By Linda Wang
In his laboratory at Harvard University, chemist Charles M. Lieber puts a drop of clear solution onto a tiny silicon wafer. It looks like any old liquid, but it isn’t. Suspended in the fluid are millions of wires, tens of thousands of times thinner than a human hair. These wires could become the building blocks of smaller, cheaper, and faster electronics.
Using these nanowires, Lieber and other physicists, chemists, and engineers are trying to break the barrier that faces today’s methods of fabricating the fine circuit components that go into computer chips. These current methods can’t shrink the components to dimensions measured in billionths of a meter, which are required to make chips for more powerful computers.