…and while he was there, he built Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

All you want to do after a transatlantic flight is get to your hotel room as quickly as possible, shower, and then maybe have a nap. If immigration and customs isn’t bad enough, when you arrive at this hellish hub you are only briefly reunited with your luggage before you hand it over to be conveyed to a different building in the airport, wondering if you will ever see it again…

After that, you get to go through security once more, just as if you were about to get on a flight! Shoes off, belt off, laptop out, set off buzzer, remember phone is in pocket, go through again, drop your loose change… precisely which circle of hell is this?

Next is the train ride to the faraway luggage terminal on a vehicle that accelerates and decelerates with such G-force it could be used to condition astronauts. Finally we get our bags and escape the underworld in a taxi, driven, may I add, in a similar manner to the aforementioned train – a 20 minute stay in purgatory before we reach our paradise – downtown Atlanta. (OK, ‘paradise’ might be a stretch, but trust me, compared with the airport…)

I’m not looking forward to the return journey this afternoon, but other than that, it’s been just peachy. Atlanta – thank you – you’ve been a perfect host.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

At the Wednesday morning session of the Polymers for Enabling Nanoscale Patterning symposium, C Grant Willson came to bury 157 nm lithography, not to praise it… and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography got the adjacent plot. Although there are technological challenges to face, Willson argued that physics and chemistry would not be the problem – it’s the economics, stupid.

He used a comparison with commercial aviation to highlight his point. Making faster airplanes isn’t all that difficult; making money from them is – where’s Concorde now? Just as commercial aviation has reached a speed plateau and seeks to expand by changing other variables such as capacity (see the humongous Airbus A380), so the drive to use smaller and smaller wavelengths for photolithography is no longer the focus of the semiconductor industry. Techniques to improve the resolution of established 193 nm lithography – such as immersion lithography – may be the way forward.

Willson then went on to discuss imprint lithography techniques, such as his step-and-flash nanoimprint lithography, which set the scene for the rest of the session. Although it is quite clear that optical lithography is the current standard, nanoimprint lithography seems set to make a big impression.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Both the ACS and APS seem to have used the ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, moe’ principle to assign session rooms at their spring meetings. Most of the sessions in Atlanta are held in the gargantuan Georgia World Congress Center, which is undoubtedly visible from orbit – just getting from one session to the next requires hiking boots, a compass and a couple of Power Bars.

Location aside, the biggest issue is space. At the Meijer award symposium on Sunday, not only were all of the seats filled, but the audience were standing three deep at the back of the room and more were sat on the floor at the front. When I went to some organic sessions on Monday, there were no more than 15 people in a room twice the size!

Even if you are lucky enough to get a seat in the popular sessions, let’s hope you like the people sat next to you… the seats are linked together just like they were at elementary school, and unless you have a supermodel figure (and I haven’t seen too many of those here), you get to know your neighbours quite well. And as with every other ACS meeting I’ve attended, the seats are specially designed to make you lose all feeling in the lower half of your body – almost certainly a ploy to stop you from getting up and leaving the talks…

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

There may be big money in small science, but not as much as you might think. Mike Holman from Lux Research – a leading nanotech research and advisory firm – gave an interesting presentation this afternoon about the barriers to nanotechnology commercialization. He talked of a ‘nanotechnology value chain’ rather than a specific market, and of the discipline being a ‘broad enabling technology’ that allows for incremental improvements to existing products, rather than generating completely new ones.

The total amount of nanotech funding is increasing, but it was interesting to note that whereas corporate cash is more often focused on electronics and information technology, that from the government is targetted towards healthcare and the life sciences. It seems, therefore, that the barriers to commercialization are not necessarily technological or economic ones, but also cultural and organizational – the latter two obstacles highlighted with amusing quotes about nanotechnology ‘just being a fad’.

As the session continued, however, it became clear (at least to this member of the audience), that there is another problem. When the worlds of science and business collide the words of science and business do not. What is a ‘dollar investment gap’? I think an ‘IP conduit’ featured in a few Star Trek episodes. I understand ‘cash flow’, but what do ‘development platform’ and ‘integration services’ really mean? As for ‘roadmapping’, I checked the OED, so don’t try and tell me it’s a real word. Come to think of it though, as chemists, we’re just as bad. If we start mumbling about ‘nucleophiles’ or ‘electrophiles’, non-chemists wouldn’t have a clue. Worse still, polite conversations rapidly become uncomfortable should we happen to mention ‘cleavage reactions’ or ‘backside attack’!

Nonetheless, nanotechnology is beginning to have a commercial impact and so it doesn’t really matter if we’re not all speaking the same language. After all, the money will do the talking.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

After wandering around the Sci-Mix poster session this evening, it seemed that the Sun Dial bar and restaurant would be an ideal place to unwind. Ascending to the heavens in a glass elevator, a small band of us weary delegates made our way to this revolutionary establishment that sits atop the Westin hotel in downtown Atlanta. As we settled into our seats, we noticed the Atlanta skyline sliding past us at a slightly unsettling pace, prompting one of our number to suggest that the rotation should be a little slower. “It’s not as though they have a big dial out the back that they can just twist”, I scoffed – whereupon the nice waitress standing over my shoulder informed me that indeed they did, and that she would slow our journey for us…

(A slightly embarrassed) Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)