Current research Nanomaterials

This includes subfields which develop or study materials having unique properties arising from their nanoscale dimensions.
Interface and Colloid Science has given rise to many materials which may be useful in nanotechnology, such as carbon nanotubes and other fullerenes, and various nanoparticles and nanorods.
Nanoscale materials can also be used for bulk applications; most present commercial applications of nanotechnology are of this flavor.
Progress has been made in using these materials for medical applications; see .
Nanoscale material are sometimes used in solar cells which combats the cost of traditional Silicon solar cells
Development of applications incorporating semiconductor nanoparticles to be used in the next generation of products, such as display technology, lighting, solar cells and biological imaging; see Quantum Dots.
Bottom-up approaches
These seek to arrange smaller components into more complex assemblies.
DNA nanotechnology utilizes the specificity of Watson–Crick basepairing to construct well-defined structures out of DNA and other nucleic acids.
Approaches from the field of "classical" chemical synthesi also aim at designing molecules with well-defined shape (e.g. bis-peptides
More generally, molecular self-assembly seeks to use concepts of supramolecular chemistry, and molecular recognition in particular, to cause single-molecule components to automatically arrange themselves into some useful conformation.
[edit] Top-down approaches
These seek to create smaller devices by using larger ones to direct their assembly.
Many technologies that descended from conventional solid-state silicon methods for fabricating microprocessorsare now capable of creating features smaller than 100 nm, falling under the definition of nanotechnology. Giant magnetoresistance-based hard drives already on the market fit this description,as do atomic layer deposition (ALD) techniques. Peter Grünberg and Alber Fert received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of Giant magnetoresistance and contributions to the field of spintronics in 2007.
Solid-state techniques can also be used to create devices known as nanoelectromechanica systems or NEMS, which are related to microelectromechanical systems or MEMS.
Atomic force microscope tips can be used as a nanoscale "write head" to deposit a chemical upon a surface in a desired pattern in a process called dip pen nanolithography. This fits into the larger subfield of nanolithography.
Focused ion beams can directly remove material, or even deposit material when suitable pre-cursor gasses are applied at the same time. For example, this technique is used routinely to create sub-100 nm sections of material for analysis in Transmission electron microscopy.
Functional approaches
These seek to develop components of a desired functionality without regard to how they might be assembled.
Molecular electronics seeks to develop molecules with useful electronic properties. These could then be used as single-molecule components in a nanoelectronic device. For an example see rotaxane.
Synthetic chemical methods can also be used to create what forensics call synthetic molecula motors, such as in a so-called nanocar