Nanoscale: visualizing an invisible world

"This book gives us a tour of the invisible nanoscale world. It offers many vivid color illustrations of atomic structures, each accompanied by a short, engagingly written essay. The structures advance from the simple (air, ice) to the complex (supercapacitor, rare earth magnet). Each subject was chosen not in search of comprehensiveness but because it illustrates how atomic structure creates a property (such as hardness, color, or toxicity), or because it has a great story, or simply because it is beautiful." "The color illustrations by Stephen Deffeyes are based on data from X-ray diffraction (a method used in crystallography). They are not just pretty pictures but visualizations of scientific data derived directly from those data. Together with Kenneth Deffeyes's witty commentary, they offer a vivid demonstration of the diversity and beauty found at the nanometer scale."--Jacket.

Air -- Ice and water vapor -- Gold -- Chemical bonds -- Sodium chloride -- Diamond -- Hexagonal diamond -- Nanotubes and buckyballs -- Asbestos -- Pyroxene -- Amino acids -- Phosphate -- Alpha helix and beta sheet -- Lysozime -- Drugs -- Hemoglobin -- Chlorophyll -- Urease -- Lipid membrane -- Rod virus -- Icosahedra virus -- Unit cell discovery -- Twinned crystals -- Calcite twinning -- Calcite twin plane -- Dolomite twin plane -- Quartz -- Close-packed metals -- Screw dislocation -- Erionite -- Faujasite -- Lubricants -- Montmorillonite -- Perovskite morph -- Perovskite superconductor -- Silicon diode -- Fuel cell -- Laser crystals -- Supercapacitor -- Epitaxial growth -- Memristor -- Ferromagnetism -- Rare earth magnets -- Flash memory -- Metallic glass -- Spinodal decomposition -- Diamantine -- Penrose tiling -- Penrose diffraction -- Quasicrystal.