Question: You say you work with atoms and stuff to make nanostuctures, what does this do?

Christian Wirtz answered on 11 Nov 2013:

Hi Mark,

the nanostructures I make are mainly for electronic and sensing applications. Over the last 40 years or so microchips got better and faster by making them smaller but keeping the same materials (mostly silicon). Soon we will hit the limit where we cannot make our electronic circuits any smaller as they will be the size of a few atoms. To improve any further from there we have to change the materials we work with but that also means we have to change our manufacturing techniques as some of them may not be suitable for the new materials. I work on finding ways of making these new materials and shaping them into useful structures.
Microelectronics is just one field where this will be useful but is the one I mostly work with. However, any field that wants to use these materials and their interesting properties will need to have way of actually making them so my research may be relevant in fields I haven’t even heard of.