DW-TV: Our studioguest Dieter Bimberg is a physicist and a nanotechnology expert. We journalists have long been promised a nano technology revolution. We see certain applications already now, like the glove which stays dry. Is the nano revolution really coming now?

Dieter Bimberg: The nano revolution has already entered our daily life. Everybody is using nano technology every day. For example, inside of your USB stick there is a lot of nano technology. There is a nano flash as memory device. And typically, we do not know that nano technology is used for making that flash memory.

So we have nano technology in all fields that we have every day. What is the field that you are actually working in?

This is the century of nano technology. We left the century of material science. And I am personally working in the field of nano photonics.

What does that mean?

One of the most exciting subjects is that we are trying to replace our common way to encipher information. When I go, for example, to a teller machine and I put in this card, then all my data are sent to a big computer. But the data channel is inherently insecure. And what we need is, in the future, a way to encrypt the data that really nobody can steal it. We do have losses of billions of euros, or of billions of dollars, every year just by people who are stealing such data.

If we look at other fields, like we see that the properties of materials change when we go down to the nano scale. For example gold becomes from a very inert material to something very catalytic. What is the reason for that?

When we increase the surface of materials which we have, we change the properties of these materials. So a porous material which consists essentially just out of holes and surfaces of material but nothing in between the surfaces has completely different properties than the bulk material.

Instead of importing more and more cobalt from the Congo, we can just use the materials which we do have in Europe. By material engineering we can change their properties and have new applications for these materials. That is from an economic point of view enormously important, like for energy-storage, hydrogen storage, for future energy-efficient electrical-driven cars.

That would mean we could actually store hydrogen more easily than we do today in batteries.

With the new organic metallic compounds. We just strengthen the powers. We can store in 50 kg approximately 4 kg of hydrogen, which is enough for driving us 500 kilometers.

(Interview: Ingolf Baur)