If they’re highly pragmatic and fortunate — since genius alone is insufficient and history is littered with great technologies for which the times weren’t propitious — they may proceed as Dr. Rameshwar Bhargava and his business partner, Rajan Pillai, have done.

“We developed a digital x-ray imaging system because there’s strong demand for it, and early entrants in the field haven’t delivered an attractive cost-to-performance proposition,” Bhargava says. “We chose this application because it enabled us to reach the market with nanotechnology as early as possible.”

Pillai adds: “Dr. Bhargava and I believe that while nanotechnology and quantum confined atoms will lead to products which boggle the imagination, we should first focus on using what we have to vastly improve the performance of familiar products in existing markets. If we succeed there, we figure the rest will follow.”

Nanotechnology? Quantum confined atoms? We’ll explain. Still, if we’re to fully appreciate the achievement of Bhargava and Pillai — and their Nanocrystal Technology Limited Partnership (NCT) — we should first take a few steps back from our subject for some perspective.

Today, when we routinely accept the idea that a billion transistors can be etched on a single PC chip in a pattern as complex as the entire planetary road map, nanotechnology has become the new high-tech frontier. Nanotechnology aims to build molecular machines — atom by atom — of up to 50 nanometers, or 50 billionths of a meter, in size. One nanometer is 80,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. At this scale, quantum mechanics rules and the presence or absence of individual atoms becomes crucial.

Nanotechnology is the focus of thousands of remarkable research and development efforts today. At NASA’s Ames Research Center, for instance, researchers are developing nano-based medical technologies that could be injected into astronauts to detect and kill cancers caused by the massive cosmic radiation exposure expected during a years-long manned Mars mission (proposed for launch in 2020).

Nanotech has become the new scientific buzzword. But does it constitute a scientific revolution? One real test for deciding this is whether the products that nanotechnolgy enables are reaching ordinary citizens’ lives. And by that measure, given nanotech’s science-fiction aura, you might assume that the nanotechnology revolution is still a long way off.

You’d be wrong. Expect nanotech later this year. At your dentist’s office.
Yes, we’re serious. To understand how this happened, let’s turn the clock back more than a decade, to 1990.

Early Days

In 1990, Ramesh Bhargava had already achieved a career as distinguished as any scientist with his expertise might have reasonably expected. And there were only a few such scientists, since Bhargava’s specialty — despite the fact that the computer industry absolutely depended on it — was in a quite arcane area of physics.

For two decades, Bhargava had been an authority on how the most infinitesimal impurities — on the order of one part in a trillion to one part in a billion — could dictate a semiconductor’s performance. Because of his knowledge, Bhargava had accomplished significant work, first at Bell Labs, then at IBM, and finally as an associate director at Philips Labs. Patents and several scores of papers in his name amply testified to that.

Moreover, Bhargava remained an indefatigable researcher. By 1990, he had grown especially curious about what might happen if a single impurity could be placed inside an exotic class of particle called a quantum dot.

Quantum dots had been discovered in the 1980s by a Russian researcher, Alexei Ekimov, who now works for NCT, and, later, by Louis Brus at Bell Labs. They were particles of matter so small, Bhargava knew, that a single electron’s addition or removal changed their properties. While all atoms have this characteristic, quantum dots were molecular combinations typically involving 1,000 to 100,000 atoms that nevertheless displayed some of the quantum-type behavior of atoms. As Bhargava pondered, he thought he saw how he could treat one of these incredibly small specks of matter with chemical impurities — ‘dope’ it, in semiconductor industry parlance — much as silicon wafers were treated when they were turned into microprocessor chips.

Indeed, Bhargava believed he might even do better than that. As he says today: “The process of making these quantum dots was in its infancy, but to incorporate an impurity in a quantum dot of 2 to 10 nanometers was unheard of.”

Not merely unheard of. Most scientists would probably have dismissed the idea of doping particles so small as to be almost on the atomic level. Still, Bhargava wanted to work this far down into the nanoscale, because he believed it could bring big commercial payoffs by improving the performance of light emitting devices (LEDs). So, as a director at Philips Labs, he started a small project on ‘doped nanocrystals.’

However, Philips Research had been downsizing since 1991. It was clear that a major research initiative into nano-materials was a non-starter at the company. Unwilling to forgo the dream of developing the science and technology of his doped nanocrystals, Bhargava left Philips and created Nanocrystals Technology Limited Partnership in the fall of 1993. “It’s always a difficult decision to leave a company like Philips,” he now says. “But I was convinced — even obsessed — about nanotechnology’s future. I was prepared to take any risk to start on a nanotechnology enterprise.”

The results did not come swiftly or easily. But two years later, Bhargava’s team at NCT discovered that they could achieve a twenty-fold increase in light output by reducing the size of the ‘doped nanocrystals’ from 10 to 3 nanometers — just the kind of practical benefit Bhargava had hoped could be achieved by exploiting the non-linear physics that occurs at the nanoscale.

“This was the breakthrough I was looking for,” Bhargava confirms. Actually, the achievement was greater than Bhargava and his team might have guessed when the experiment began. For in caging those atoms of impurity within 2-to 10-nanometer crystals, Bhargava had found a way to engineer the states of single atoms. This led to a discovery of historical importance: the quantum confined atom, or QCA. Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been testing QCA samples supplied by NCT for more than two years. The very idea of controlling certain properties of a single atom at room temperature seems impossible. Mike Barnes, an Oak Ridge researcher who has been studying the physics of QCAs says, “What I have seen with my own eyes in my own lab is really, truly amazing. And we are still trying to understand it.”

Nano-business

Increasingly, Bhargava’s thoughts became filled with the stunning applications he saw emerging from his QCAs: things like high-resolution digital x-ray imaging products, efficient solid-state lighting, cheaper and better magneto-optical memories and fiber-optic components.

“I met Ramesh in late 1993,” Rajan Pillai recalls. “Before entering law and finance, I acquired a graduate physics degree. So Ramesh’s vision of nanotechnology fascinated me even when I didn’t fully understand it. Furthermore, he’s one of those rare scientists who delights in showing you that science is fun — something which I think distinguishes a great mind from a merely good one. Working with such a person, I saw, would be a joyous journey, no matter what difficulties we encountered.”

The NCT partners have stayed the course for nine years and now view their shared vision as largely vindicated. Lawrence Berkeley National Labs has also affirmed the remarkable characteristics of quantum confined atoms. Bhargava and Pillai say that a chain of patents establishing NCT’s intellectual property provides “a sustainable technological moat” against future competitors. The partners plan to be acutely product-oriented for the next few years, focusing initially on digital x-ray imaging and lighting.

Regarding the former application, Bhargava explains: “Conversion of x-rays to light by phosphors is necessary for film or digital imaging. By using optimized combinations of phosphors and filling them in micron-sized channels of a microchannel plate (containing anywhere from 2 million to 3 million channels per square inch), NCT converts x-rays to light with minimal scattering. We’re now testing our dental scintillator — the x-ray-to-light converter in our dental sensor — with some of our commercial partners. We should begin selling that later this year. By late 2003, we’ll have a complete digital imaging sensor for the dental market. Thereafter, we’ll proceed to areas like cardiac imaging, mammography and osteoporosis.”

“Our vision is to convert medical imaging from a centralized function in hospitals to a distributed desktop function in an average physician’s office,” Pillai says. “Our technology not only provides a 100 percent improvement in image quality and an 80 percent reduction in x-ray dosage, but also will drastically reduce costs.” Given that cost reduction, and the growing demand for healthcare services generated by growing elderly populations in many countries, Pillai predicts that the global medical imaging market will see vigorous expansion.

Concerning the lighting applications, Bhargava says: “Since by confining an atom in a cage, we can modulate and increase light output from that atom, QCA-based nanophosphors will help develop a whole new range of solid-state lamps. We should have the first such product ready in about a year.”

“Our vision there,” Pillai adds, “is products which significantly reduce energy consumption. Lighting is 20 percent of American energy use and perhaps 80 percent in developing countries. QCA-based technology can help solid-state lighting reach higher efficiency levels and become a preferred choice for many applications.”

Are Bhargava and Pillai being overly ambitious? In view of the radical improvements that their nanotech-based products potentially represent, the two partners’ expectations may be quite realistic. And just what sort of growth trajectory do they anticipate?

“Look at PCs from 1978 to 1990,” Pillai says. “That sort of growth rate and transformation is what we expect in both of our chosen markets.”