New Technologies

The practical human beings, along the history down, performed the ancient technologies by trial and error. The alloy technologies, the tempering of the steel, the irrigation of agriculture fields, etc. are some examples. The practical human beings continue making new technologies. Even though now their knowledge and search are leaded by the science, their results are not. There are still surprises.

The surprises appear in all the scientific areas.

In January 1999, the physicists discovered the element 114. It appears that this element initiates an stable family of elements. Leaves the possibility of preparing more stable elements than the transuranic ones. Close to the middle of 1999, the physicists discovered the element 118. The possibility becomes a reality.

But not only with new elements there are surprises. Also with the old known elements, when they show themselves in not suspected forms. The carbon gave those surprises. The carbon showed itself in the form of fullerene, to the delight of the physicists. The chemists, H.W. Kroto, R. E. Smalley, and R. F. Curl, detected the fullerene in 1985. And they got the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1996. Up to Stockholm, the surprise echoed.

The fullerene is an allotropic form of carbon. The diamond other. And the graphite other one. The crystals of the diamond have the octahedron form. The crystals of graphite are plane laminar. The crystals of fullerene have the form of a football soccer ball. In this round shape form there are packed 60 atoms of carbon. This allotropic form of the carbon acquire the form of very slim and large tube -nanotubes-.

In its large tubular form, the fullerene is more resistant than the steel to the deformation and more resistant. The fullerene is not so heavy than the steel. The fullerene is inert chemically. And conducts the electricity like a metal.

Therefore, the fullerene is an ideal material to fabricate molecular wires. Nano probes. Those could be applied in the fabrication of computers and another dispositives that require to be very resistant and light -for example the fuselage of planes-.

Like the carbon in form of fullerene, other materials based on carbon could be obtained when arrangements of atoms and molecules be manipulated. The number of combinations in stable arrangements is huge. The condition is to obtain a configuration of atoms of minimal energy. Each of those configurations will give an allotropic form. Each of those will have singular properties.

And materials with chemical, physical, mechanical, electronical, optical, magnetical, electrical, etc. properties will be obtained by design.

The computation of the future have particular problems on materials. The transference, process, and storage of information are the origin of those problems. The liquid crystals, the optical fibers, the polymer conductors, alloys, photocells, catalysts, inorganic polymers, superconductors, photonic materials, etc. are investigated to solve those problems.

The nanotechnology will depend on the manipulation of the atoms of the materials. The molecular architecture will be possible. And electromechanic systems in miniature will be obtained. Mechanisms of the size of a molecule will be possible. At their time, these molecular machines could be used in the construction of other molecules. With them, the structure of the cell could be manipulated. And when the cell be manipulated, cures of the human body, at molecular level, will be possible.

Before the nanotechnology could be a reality manipulating atom by atom, the technology of superconductors, of the alloys, of the semiconductors, of ionic implants, of the X ray lithography, the deposition of materials by molecular beams, the deposition of materials by transmission electronic microscope, etc. will be applying and perfectioning.

The physicists, using the technique of electronic microscopy, deposit layers of atoms of $30~angstroms$ of thickness. Also they fabricate lasers based on semiconductors. Those lasers, of the size of a lentil, are revolutionizing the communications. The physicists apply those dispositives to store and to process information. The smaller laser could be molecule size; the size of a molecule of the semiconductor laser. This limit will revolutionize the optoelectronic technology.

The physicists have intensify the search of alloys and semiconductor mixtures to produce lasers of shorter wave length. For example, to pass from the red laser light to the blue laser light meant a big forward step. With red laser light, the digital video disks (DVD) have a capacity of 4.7 GB by each side. With blue laser light, have a capacity of 15 GB by each side. These can storage video information for 6 continuous hours. The next step is to go to the violet laser light and then to the ultraviolet. And from these to the X rays. Those will be gigantic steps. In each one of those, there will be bigger and bigger capacity of storage.

Obtaining materials for the fabrication of permanent magnets is another line of industrial investigation. Using conventional metallurgical techniques, the industrial companies produce permanent magnets of more than $36 \times 10^6$ gauss-oersted of storage magnetic energy.

The mixtures of superconductor ceramics is another advance in the technology of new materials. The systems will be more efficient. That will allow to save millions of dollars, per year, to the big companies in the electric bill. Actually the best superconductors operate with liquid nitrogen. Close to 94K. The next step will be obtaining superconductors that operate at room temperature.

The technique for fabrication of integrated circuits, and chips, has been improved. Now there are tridimensional optoelectronic chips. They will be exploited to the implementation of parallel process in processing and transmitting information. The number of miniature transistors in a tridimensional chip is about 10 million.

The amorphous materials also offers many technological possibilities. Those material are handled in form of thin films. The optoelectronic properties are commercially exploited in transistors, solar cells, etc.

The technological exploitation of those new advances and discoveries in the high energy physics are to be done. Maybe some day information could be stored in the proton quarks, or could use the spin of the $\Lambda^0$s to store and compute information, and the gamma rays to record and read information. The possibilities that offer the manipulation of the quarks are more numerous than those that offer the manipulation of electrons and photons. The technology based on the manipulation of the quarks will be for us as much fantastic as, maybe more, the actual technology, based on electrons, would appear to the seventeen century physicists.