Richard Feynman delivers his famous talk, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," to the American Physical Society, explaining that matter behaves very differently at the nano level of a few atoms from the way it does at the human scale, and proposing that research into the special properties of matter at the nano level would have major implications for humanity.

Leo Esaki proposes the creation of man-made nano-sized semiconductor structures, such as superlattices, pioneering the bottom-up approach to nanomanufacturing.

First experimental SNOM (Scanning Near-field Optical Microscope) appears.

[How near-field light works]

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Various concepts based on manipulation of metals at the nano level proposed, quantum dots, containers able to confine one or more electrons.

[The quantum dot concept]

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