Nanoscale Materials, Approaches and Nanostructures 1. What are Nanoscale Materials (NSM)? In today's class, we were introduced to the concept of Nanoscale Materials, commonly referred to as NSM. These are materials that have at least one dimension in the range of 1 to 100 nanometres. To put this into perspective, one nanometre is one-billionth of a metre, and a human hair is nearly 80,000 nm wide. So nanomaterials are incredibly small. The reason NSM are studied separately is that their properties are quite different from the same material in its normal bulk form. Two main reasons explain this: • As the size of a material decreases to the nanoscale, its surface area relative to its volume increases a lot. This means more atoms are on the surface, making the material more reactive. • At such a small scale, quantum mechanical effects become noticeable and start affecting the electrical, optical, and magnetic properties of the material. A simple example is gold. In...