Introduction

The project of producing a special issue of the journal "Problems of Nonlinear Analysis in Engineering Systems" as a picture of the current efforts in the emerging fields ofљ Nanoscience and Nanotechnology was suggested to me by Prof. Lyudmila Kuzmina when we met in Rome in 2002, where she had come to attend a congress in aerospace science and engineering. Her proposal was the outcome of the presentation of a paper of mine concerning Nanotechnology that I had given previously in the same year at Pittsburgh, USA, at the 12th International Congress of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics, held jointly with the 4th Workshop of the International Institute of General Systems Studies, where I met her. I very happily accepted that proposal without thinking it over because it was a proof of the widely increasing concrete interest for research and development in mesoscopic physics and in its envisageable technological applications; but soon I realized that it was not an easy task to put together just a thumbnail sketch of Nanotechnoloy and Nanoscience that could convey enough information to the reader about the present wide, international, multifarious and continuously growing research activities in such fields, and about theљ ideas, the processes and the products envisageable for near- and long-term projects and widely debated in specialized journals. I am in the hope that the following choice of papers contributed by distinguished scientists in the field can serve the purpose of giving the reader an opportunity to learn about some of the most significant facets of these fields and to grasp the basic philosophies of the nanoscale approach to matter and information, I mean, the landscape of the current basic and innovative ideas, attitudes, problems and researches concerning the nanoworld.

A few words to introduce the subjects dealt with in this issue are in order.

 

Francisco Torrens (Spain). Some calculations on single-wall carbon nanotubes.

Cameron L. Jones (RSA). Cryptographic hash functions and CD-based optical biosensors.

R.F.Fakhrullin, S.S.Kharintsev, O.A.Konovalova, M.Kh.Salakhov, V.G.Vinter (Russia). The development of DNA-nanosensors based on piezoelectric resonators.

Peter Möck (USA). Transformations in endotaxial element and epitaxial III-V compound semiconductor quantum dots.

Daniel M.Dubois (Belgium). A survey of incursive, hyperincursive and anticipative systems.

Salvatore Santoli (Italy). Non-commutative geometry to bridge nano- and macroscale information.

 

The paper by Francisco Torrens (València, Spain) belongs to the very important subject of carbon nanotubes, which are now much investigated for their electronic and mechanical properties. They look like being very promising structures for a number of engineering and nanoscience applications, both for nanoelectronics and nanomechanics. Their technologies could be taken to be valid tools, I mean real enabling technologies, toward the Drexlerian goal of reaching the ability to build systems "bottom up", or atom by atom with nm accuracy, an approach that has been dubbed molecular manufacturing.

A CD-based optical biosensor, which is also considered a development in nanoscale-augmented image processing and gives the possibility of encryption through biocells nanocipher, is discussed in the paper by Dr. Cameron Jones (Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia). The combination of cells and software algorithms on CD-based digital data supplies challenges in the development of hybrid encryption protocols and pseudo-random bit generators.

A very simple and practical nanosensor is developed in paper of R.F.Fakhrullin, S.S.Kharintsev, O.A.Konovalova, M.Kh.Salakhov, V.G.Vinter (Kazan, Russia) piezoelectric resonators are used, and mass differences as small as 1 ng can be revealed. The device, bearing DNA molecules immobilized on a polylysine nanolayer, was tested for diagnostic purposes, but offers the possibility of applications in many other fields, and its simple structure makes it a strong competitor as to cost and practicality against the techniques which are presently in use.

Endotaxially and epitaxially self-assembled semiconductor quantum dots are reviewed in Prof. P.Möck's paper (Portland, USA); structural and morphological transformations are shown to be reasonably explainable through thermodynamic considerations. Quantum dots are becoming increasingly interesting for nanoelectronic devices. What is remarkable with their use consists in the possibility of realizing networks of very complex topologies as a result of connection through optical, i.e. electromagnetic, links instead of being forced to adopt fixed wiring.

Prof. D.Dubois's paper (Liège, Belgium) introduces the emerging computing techniques of incursion, hyperincursion and the concept of anticipatory system. These concepts are very promising for their application on the nanoscale, both to Nanotechnology and to Nanobiology: e.g., for speeding up the (presently slow) reversible, i.e. Hamiltonian, nanocomputers, and to get a better physical understanding of anticipatory behavior of biosystems, which has been experimentally ascertained recently in the genomes of single cell organisms and cannot be described by the standard Turing's recursivity concepts.

Biomimicry as a problem in nanosystems is considered in my own contribution to the issue. The paper is concerned with the application of the emerging notion of Quantum Holography to nanosystems in general, and in particular to nanostructured biomimetic systems, mainly to bioinspired intelligent robots. It consists in a "geometric quantization strategy" which is based on non-commutative geometry and on the Weyl-Heisenberg group of symmetries of Quantum Holography, which is valid for photonic fields and for systems other than photonic (Generalized Quantum Holography); the group implements the information processing capabilities based on an energy-independent, purely geometric approach. This allows information to be stretched from the microphysical to the macroscopic level, passing through the nanolevel and overcoming the "semantic barriers" between energy gaps in a self-organizing hierarchical dynamical system mimicking the biological structure-function solidarity.

 

Thanks are due to Prof. Lyudmila Kuzmina for giving me the possibility of producing as a Guest Editor this special dedicated issue on the two important fields of knowledge of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology: two fields of investigation through which our ideas about matter, spacetime and physical information as opposed to Shannon's abstract information will be so deepened as to make us change our approach to the underlying physics of the Universe, and to our ways of engineering matter and deal with information for the welfare of the Mankind.

 

 

 

Guest Editor

Salvatore Santoli

Director of the INT -

International Nanobiological Testbed, Ltd

Italy