Feynman’s talk:

 In 1959, Richard Feynman gave a talk to the American Physical Society in which he laid out some of the
consequences of measuring and manipulating materials at the nanoscale.
This talk, “There is plenty of room at the bottom,”
 The remarkable technological implications laid out in Feynman’s talk form the basis of most people’s
impression of Nanoscience.
 This vast size ofAvogadro’s number underlies much of the technology discussed by Feynman in his 1959 talk.
 Feynman started his talk by stating that we should look back from the vantage of the year 2000 and wonder why it took
anyone till 1960 to point these things out. I suspect most of us are amazed at just how much Richard Feynman got right
in 1959.
 Feynman’s 1959 talk is often cited as a source of inspiration for Nano science, but it was virtually unknown
outside of his small audience at the time and only published as a scientific paper in 1992. Nano science
really sprang into the public consciousness sometime after the invention of the scanning tunneling
microscope (STM) in 1981.
 Here was an amazing tool that could image and manipulate atoms. Atomic scale imaging had been possible
in the past with multimillion-dollar transmission electron microscopes, but the STM was a bench-top tool that
a graduate student could assemble for a few hundred dollars.
 The First International Conference on Scanning Tunneling Microscopy was held in Santiago De Compostela,
Spain, July 14–18, 1986.
 The impact of the STM on surface science was already so great at this time that the 1986 Nobel Prize in
physics was awarded to Gerd Binning and Heinrich Rohrer for their invention of the STM. (It was shared with
Ernst Ruska, one of the inventors of the electron microscope.)
 The invention of the atomic force microscope (AFM) in 1986 greatly extended the reach of these tools.
 The chemists could image directly some of the fantastic structures they had only dreamed of making,
 and a bright young biochemist in NewYork, Ned Seeman, was able to realize his dream of building
nanoscale machines with self-assembly of DNA molecules. Thus was born the field of DNA nanotechnology.
 Major government funding of Nanoscience as a separate discipline began in the 1990s,
 Feynman predicted that nanostructures could be “printed” directly on to surfaces: “We would just have to
press the same metal plate again into the plastic and we would have another copy.”George Whitesides has
developed a stamping technology based on silicone rubber stamps that are cured on top of silicon
nanostructures, leaving an imprint of the nano-features on the surface of the stamp. The stamp can then be
used to print out multiple copies of the original (laboriously manufactured) nanostructure very rapidly Stamp
technology is covered.
I imagine experimental physicists must often look with envy at men like Kamerlingh
Onnes, who discovered a field like low temperature, which seems to be
bottomless and in which one can go down and down. Such a man is then a leader
and has some temporary monopoly in a scientific adventure. Percy Bridgman,
in designing a way to obtain-higher pressures, opened up another new field
and was able to move into it and to lead us all along. The development of ever
higher vacuum was a continuing development of the same kind. I would like to describe a field, in which little has
been done, but in which an
enormous amount can be done in principle. This field is not quite the same as
the others in that it will not tell us much of fundamental physics (in the sense of,
“What are the strange particles? ”) but it is more like solid-state physics in the
sense that it might tell us much of great interest about the strange phenomena
that occur in complex situations. Furthermore, a point that is most important is
that it would have an enormous number of technical applications. What I want to talk about is the problem of
manipulating and controlling
things on a small scale.
As soon as I mention this, people tell me about miniaturization, and how far it
has progressed today. They tell me about electric motors that are the size of the
nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market, they tell me, by
which you can write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. But that’s nothing;
that’s the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a
staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back
at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody
began seriously to move in this direction.
Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on
the head of a pin?
Let’s see what would be involved. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an
inch across. If you magnify it by 25 000 diameters, the area of the head of the
pin is then equal to the area of all the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Therefore, all it is necessary to do is to reduce in size all the writing in the
Encyclopaedia by 25 000 times. Is that possible? The resolving power of the
eye is about 1/120 of an inch—that is roughly the diameter of one of the little
dots on the fine half-tone reproductions in the Encyclopaedia. This, when you
demagnify it by 25 000 times, is still 80 angstroms in diameter—32 atoms
across, in an ordinary metal. In other words, one of those dots still would

Nano scale dimensions:

 Nanoscience is about the phenomena that occur in systems with nanometer dimensions.
 The diameter of a hydrogen atom is about one-tenth of a nanometer, so the nanometer scale is the very smallest scale on
which we might consider building machines on the basis of the principles we learn from everyday mechanics, using the
1000 or so hydrogen atoms we could pack into a cube of size 1 nm×1 nm×1 nm.
 In 1959, Richard Feynman gave a talk to the American Physical Society in which he laid out some of the consequences
of measuring and manipulating materials at the nanoscale. This talk, “There is plenty of room at the bottom,”
Course overview and goals:

 The remarkable technological implications laid out in Feynman’s talk form the basis of most
people’s impression of Nanoscience. But there is more to Nanoscience than technology.
 Nanoscience is where atomic physics converges with the physics and chemistry of complex
systems
 In nanostructures, we have, layered on top of quantum mechanics, the statistical behavior of a
large collection of interacting atoms.

2.1.1 Particles and waves?

 If you have already had exposure to quantum mechanics, then you will recognize this pattern as the interference pattern
that results from the wavelike behavior of the probability amplitude for finding electrons. deBroglie proposed, and
many experiments have verified, that electrons with a momentum of magnitude pe
 (when specifying both magnitude and direction we will use the vector symbol pe) have a “wavelength” λ associated with
the probability of finding the particle given by λ =h/pe, (2.1)
 where h is the Planck’s constant, 6.63×10−34 Js, and pe is the momentum, mv, of an electron of mass me(me = 9.1×10−31
kg) undergoing linear motion with velocity, v(m/s). The classical definition of momentum (as mass × velocity) is valid
at speeds much less than that of light. The spacing of the fringes observed
 in Fig. 2.1(e) turns out to be exactly that expected from the interference of waves with a wavelength given by Equation
2.1, emerging from the two “sources” in the biprism. By analogy with optics, we will call each of the sources a “slit,”
acting as a source of “light” in a “double slit” experiment.
 In the center of the screen, waves from both slits travel the same distance to the screen, so they have the same phase on
reaching the screen. This is illustrated by the two beams that pass from the center of each side of the biprism on to the
screen in Fig. 2.2. However, at a point off to one side of the center of the screen (as measured by an angular
displacement of the beam, θ) the lower beam travels an extra distance “x” given by d sin θ (see the little triangle in Fig.
2.2—d is the spacing between the middle of the two sources). Whenever x is an integral number of wavelengths, the
beams arrive exactly in phase and a maximum (bright fringe) is seen. The angular spacing of the fringes is thus given by

 where λ is obtained from Equation 2.1. Therefore, the statistical distribution of these point-like particles follows an
interference pattern like waves. But we know that the electrons are not themselves “waves” and cannot be split like
waves because there is only one electron in the apparatus at a time.