Touring the Solid State Electronics Laboratory is like being in a submarine — pipes and tubes line narrow, dimly lit halls, and the monotony of cinderblock walls is broken occasionally by consoles bristling with meters and valves, strobe lights ready to flash out warnings should something go wrong.

The hallways pass large racks of buzzing metal and wire and a constant hum resonates from the floor.

Sandrine Martin pauses while navigating the SSEL’s corridors to point to a room emitting a pale yellow glow. “That’s our most expensive piece of equipment,” says Martin, an adjunct electrical engineering and computer science professor. Inside is a large rectangular box that looks like a stainless steel refrigerator on its side, only with more doors. It’s called an electron-beam lithographer, and it costs $1 million.

The point of it all: to produce as little as possible. That’s the mantra of the fields of micro- and nanotechnology, which are at the center of research in the North Campus lab. Micro- and nanotechnology deal with the manipulation of substances at extremely small scales to make tiny mechanisms and electronics. The difference between micro- and nanotechnology lies solely in scale: Nanotechnology is more minuscule extension of microtechnology.

Less is more for the scientists who continually push for smaller structures and finer detail. And today, “less” is tinier than ever before: “micro” refers to the micron, a unit of length that is a millionth of a meter (a human hair is 15 microns in diameter). A nanometer is a thousandth of a micron or one billionth of a meter.

“When you go down to these levels, you are at the same scales as the distance between two atoms or a molecule,” Martin said.

But Martin and her colleagues’ obsession with ever shrinking-technology begs the question: What’s the point?

Khalil Najafi, an electrical engineering and computer science professor and director of the SSEL, smiled when asked the question.

“Well, that will take a long time to answer.”

Every aspect of modern life and many scientific fields, such as biotechnology, could potentially be impacted by nanotechnology, Najafi said.

“Because it deals with the smallest elements of many objects, nanotechnology will have a profound impact on everything from the materials we use in our daily lives, such as coatings to protect fabric, to many new drugs being developed that require (nanotechnology) to amplify their effectiveness and reduce their side effects,” he said. Using nanotechnology, researchers can gain insight into the chemical makeup of these fabrics and drugs and manipulate them to increase their efficiency.

This same technology could offer doctors new ways to monitor their patients’ vital signs through tiny implanted machines, Martin said. “These devices can go through the skin or use the blood system as channels and circulate in the body,” she said. Once there, they can be used to check up on a patient or administer specifically targeted drugs.

Nanotechnology could also aid environmental scientists in developing strategies to combat pollution. “Pollution is caused — in one form or another — by nano-sized particles, and understanding how these particles are generated and interact with one another and the atmosphere will help us to either prevent or mitigate problems that come up,” Najafi said.

But nanotechnology isn’t just part of a distant future where tiny robots scrub the air. In fact, nanotechnology is already ubiquitous in today’s world. You just might not be able to see it — and that’s the point.

Advances in micro- and nanotechnology, for instance, are responsible for the small-and-getting-smaller size of many electronics.

“Already, many electronic products from computers to … music players and cameras incorporate what we call ‘nanotechnology-enabled’ devices,” Najafi said. “Computer chips are made of transistors that are about 100 nanometers large and can therefore contain hundreds of millions of transistors in an area smaller than a postage stamp.”

Nanotechnology has also been put to practical use outside the electronics industry; companies have used nanotechnology to develop stain-resistant pants and flexible tennis racquets with the strength of steel. These materials were made using many techniques perfected in nanotechnology labs like the SSEL.

And as nano- and microtechnology advance, the fields to which they can be applied continue to expand.