Richard Feynmann
“There’s plenty of room at the bottom!”. With this memorable speech, Richard Feynmann suggested the idea that no physical principles prevent us from building machines on the atomic scale, as small as few atoms. This initiated the ‘nano-technology’ revolution: physics labs all around the world are busy inventing tiny nano-machines that are changing the way we cure diseases, detect chemicals, sense electromagnetic fields, etc, etc. Physicists can nowadays design systems ‘atom by atom’: look for example at this movie made by researchers at IBM by moving a single atom with a tiny tip
Want to learn more?
As part of your Physics degree at Heriot-Watt, you can take the courses B21NT1 (Nanophotonics) and B21NS2 (Nanophysics).
During your internships, you could join our research labs and build light sources and magnetic sensors smaller than 1/10,000 of a single strand of human hair or develop novel optical devices that exploit nano-structures for improved performance
See Quantum Photonics lab, https://qpl.eps.hw.ac.uk/, Nanophotonics Lab and the Advanced Structured Nanophotonics ASN lab https://www.asn-lab.org/.