Nanotechnology White Paper - US Environmental Protection Agency

EPA Nanotechnology White Paper
Appendix A: Glossary of Nanotechnology Terms
Aerosol: A cloud of solid or liquid particles in a gas.
Array: An arrangement of sensing elements in repeating or non-repeating units that are arranged
for increased sensitivity or selectivity.
Biomimetic: Imitating nature and applying those techniques to technology.
Buckyball/C60: see Fullerenes, of which “buckyballs” is a subset. The term “buckyball” refers
only to the spherical fullerenes and is derived from the word “Buckminsterfullerene,” which is
the geodesic dome / soccer ball-shaped C60 molecule. C60 was the first buckyball to be
discovered and remains the most common and easy to produce.
Catalyst: A substance, usually used in small amounts relative to the reactants, that modifies and
increases the rate of a reaction without being consumed or changed in the process..
Dendrimers: artificially engineered or manufactured molecules built up from branched units
called monomers. Technically, a dendrimer is a branched polymer, which is a large molecule
comprised of many smaller ones linked together.
Diamondoid: Nanometer-sizes structures derived from the diamond crystal structure.
Electron beam lithography: Lithographic patterning using an electron beam, usually to induce
a change in solubility in polymer films. The resulting patterns can be subsequently transferred to
other metallic, semiconductor, or insulating films.
Engineered/manufactured nanomaterials: Nanosized materials are purposefully made. These
are in contrast to incidental and naturally occurring nanosized materials.
Engineering/manufacturing may be done through certain chemical and / or physical processes to
create materials with specific properties. There are both "bottom-up" processes (such as selfassembly)
that create nanoscale materials from atoms and molecules, as well as "top-down"
processes (such as milling) that create nanoscale materials from their macro-scale counterparts.
Nanoscale materials that have macro-scale counterparts frequently display different or enhanced
properties compared to the macro-scale form.
Exposure assessment: The determination or estimation (qualitative or quantitative) of the
magnitude, frequency, duration, route, and extent (number of people) of exposure to a chemical,
material, or microorganism.
Fullerenes: Pure carbon, cage-like molecules composed of at least 20 atoms of carbon. The
word ‘fullerene’ is derived from the word “Buckminsterfullerene,” which refers specifically to
the C60 molecule and is named after Buckminster Fuller, an architect who described and made
famous the geodesic dome. C60 and C70 are the most common and easy to produce fullerenes.
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