Next High-Tech Polishing Fluid: Tea—A new brew for the computer industry
By Peter Weiss
Many tea drinkers know about tannins, those pesky molecules that stain teeth and ceramic mugs. Last year, John L. Lombardi, a green tea drinker, learned that makers of hard-disk drives were thirsting for a nontoxic polishing liquid that would cling to ceramic grains and flush them away.
“A light went off in my head,” recalls Lombardi, a materials scientist and head of Ventana Research, a small surface-chemistry laboratory in Tucson.