Delft, The Netherlands, January 06, 2019 - Andreas Schmidt-Ott, high-tech pioneer and co-founder of VSParticle announces the launch of the book “Spark Ablation, Building Blocks for Nanotechnology.” The book represents a collective effort being written by a total of 28 researchers from nine different countries, reviewed and edited under Andreas penmanship. The subject deals with spark ablation, a versatile and elegant method of producing the necessary building blocks in nanotechnology. The method is applicable to many technological applications that could lead the way to important innovations in the near future.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Andreas Schmidt-Ott witnessed and contributed to a basic research in solid-state physics dealing with metal particles only a few nanometers in diameter.This size range had been identified as exciting because of the basic changes in the behavior of matter that occur here. The so called “size effects,” had been predicted from quantum theory and started to be experimentally verified at the time.

Below about 5 nm, the property–size relations changes discontinuously and spontaneously with every atom added or removed, which opens, in principle, a myriad of possible properties with applications in catalysis, chemical sensing, electronics, and many other fields. 

40 years later, surprisingly most available inorganic nano products are not yet available in the range of a few nanometers. One of the reasons for the rather slow pace with which we are moving toward the exploitation of size effects below 20 nm is the difficulty of producing well-defined, stable objects and structures in this size range.

Andreas Schmidt-Ott, born in 1952, completed his Ph.D. thesis at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of ETH in Zurich, Switzerland in 1979. In 1988 he joined the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Duisburg University, Germany as Assistant Professor and then became Associate Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Dept. of the same university, where he was Deputy Faculty Chair 1998 - 2001. Subsequently, he accepted a full professorship in Nanoparticle Technology at the Chemical Engineering Department of Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, where he has an emeritus status since 2018. Since 2016 he is also Adjunct Professor at The Cyprus Institute in Nicosia. His main areas of expertise are Nanoparticle and Materials Technology. He temporarily served as Secretary General of the German Aerosol Association (GAeF) and Board Member of the American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR). He is or was a member of several Editorial Boards of journals and advisor to the Health Council of The Netherlands.