Engineers at the University of Minnesota in the US have developed a new technique for making silicon nanoparticles in plasmas at room temperature. The method overcomes problems encountered with existing plasma-based approaches and can produce crystalline nanoparticles with a uniform size. The team says that the crystals could be used to make novel electronic devices, such as single-nanoparticle transistors (A Bapat et al. 2004 arxiv.org/abs/physics0410038).