Professor Igor Sokolov and graduate student Ravi M. Gaikwad adopted polishing technology used in the semiconductor industry (chemical mechanical planarization) to polish the surface of human teeth down to nanoscale roughness.

Roughness left on the tooth after the polishing is just a few nanometers, which is one-billionth of a meter or about 100,000 times smaller than a grain of sand.

The researcher demonstrated that teeth polished in this way become too "slippery" for the "bad" bacteria that is responsible for the destruction of dental enamel.

Thus, it becomes fairly easy to remove the bacteria before they cause damage to the enamel.While silica particles have been used before for tooth polishing, but polishing with nanosized particles has not been reported as yet.

The researchers hypothesized that such polishing may protect tooth surfaces against the damage caused by cariogenic bacteria, because the bacteria can be removed easily from such polished surfaces.