TABLE OF CONTENTS At the turn of twenty-first century, we entered nanoworld. These days, if you try to run a simple Web search with the keyword "nano," thousands and thousands of references will come out: nanoparticles, nanowires, nanostructures, nanocomposite materials, nanoprobe microscopy, nanoelectronics, nanotechnology, and so on. The list could be endless.
When did this scientific nanorevolution actually happen? Perhaps, it was in the mid-1980s, when scanning tunneling microscopy was invented. Specialists in electron microscopy may strongly object to this fact by claiming decades of experience in observing features with nearly atomic resolution and later advances in electron-beam lithography. We should not omit molecular beam epitaxy, the revolutionary technology of the 1980s, which allows producing layered structures with the thickness of each layer in the nanometer range. Colloid chemists would listen to that with a wry smile, and say that in the 1960s and 1970s, they made Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) films with extremely high periodicity in nanometer scale. From this point of view, the nanorevolution was originated from the works of Irving Langmuir and Katherine Blodgett [1, 2] in 1930s, or from later works of Mann and Kuhn [3 5], Aviram and Ratner [6], and Carter [7], which declared ideas of molecular electronics in the 1970s. What is the point of such imaginary arguments? All parties were right. We cannot imagine modern nanotechnology without any of the above-mentioned contributions. The fact is that we are in the nanoworld now, and the words with prefix "nano-" suddenly have become everyday...
