It derives its name from the nanometre, a unit of measurement equalling one billionth of a meter.
Chemical vapour deposition allows control of the thickness of the film on a nanometre scale, which is essential for some applications.
Desert varnish is usually around one micrometer thick and represents nanometre-scale layering.
The two are often confused, but a micrometre is one thousandth of a millimetre or one thousand nanometres, so there is a huge difference in scale.
It covers a range of scale from 0.1 to 100 nanometres.
Put simply, it is the application of material sciences at around the nanometre scale—that is, one billionth of a metre.
To give an idea of the scale of the science that we are considering, a human hair is approximately 80,000 to 100,000 nanometres in diameter.
A nanometre is one billionth of a metre, or approximately 10 hydrogen molecules lying end to end.
