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Physical Society Colloquium
Peter Grütter
Physics Department In 1959, Richard Feynman gave a lecture entitled `There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom' (reprinted in Engineering and Science, Feb. 1960, pp. 22-36). Feynman suggested a variety of experiments and technologies that might be achieved at very small scales. This is an area that is currently getting a lot of hype. Some recent suggestions sound like science fiction, although we are not yet seeing articles titled `Honey, I Shrunk the Factory'. Nevertheless, terrific advances have been and are being made. In this talk, I will introduce some of the scientific and technological challenges at the nanoscale frontier. In particular, I will concentrate on scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), which is one of the techniques that allows us not only to look at individual atoms, but also to manipulate them. This allows us to place single atoms and molecules at selected positions, to build structures atom by atom. STM has thus become a critical tool for making and exploring structures on an atomic scale. The lessons these experiments teach us extend beyond the new physics in small dimensions to encompass the general process of learning from biology and chemistry. By then going beyond what is observed in the natural world to deliberate engineering on an atomic scale, we are, indeed, beginning to move into the Room at the Bottom.
Friday, September 22nd 2000, 15:30 |