From: zeb haradon (zebharadon@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Dec 20 2000 - 15:22:26 MST
If you cannot find a school with a good nanotech program, or can't get a
school to accept it as a special major, then drop out and just do it
yourself. Or, major in business or something, to pay the bills, and to
finance your studies. I did a cursosry search, looking to see if you could
find used AFMs or STMs online for reasonable prices. Although I didn't find
any on ebay, there are at least three sites which sell both AFMs and STMs:
http://www.molec.com/products/index.html
http://www.di.com/
http://www.asmicro.com/
I didn't look too closely, but the only one I could find prices on was the
third site. If you call some universities, do in-depth searches, newsgroup
postings, you can probably find some nice used equiptment.
Also, you could build an STM yourself:
http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/10_24_98/Bob2.htm (scroll to the bottom
of the page)
Atom-viewing 101: Make STMs at home
For all the sophisticated science that scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs)
have spawned, they require surprisingly little technological sophistication
to build.
"It's very simple technology," says Phillip E. Russell, a scientist at North
Carolina State University in Raleigh who runs the school's
scanning-probe-microscopy program. "In my short course, I tell you how to do
it with Radio Shack parts." The absence of lenses makes STMs relatively
simple. Moreover, remarkably sensitive but widely available piezoelectric
elements—common parts of doorbell buzzers and charcoal spark lighters—can
give subnanometer control of motion.
High school and even middle school students and their teachers seem to grasp
the microscope's concepts, and "they are not afraid of it," says Russell.
One brave builder was in high school when he cobbled together in his bedroom
an STM out of Legos and bungee cords. Adam Ezra Cohen of New York built the
device for a pittance—about $50, he estimates—and with no
microscope-building experience.
Make no mistake. Cohen, now 19, is not your run-of-the-mill home tinkerer.
Before graduating high school, he had already compiled a file of more than
140 invention ideas, invented an electrochemical data-storage device and an
eye tracker used in neurology research, and won the $40,000 first-place
scholarship in the 1997 Science Talent Search (SN: 3/15/97, p. 159). He won
the grand prize for both building the STM and devising a way to use it as an
"electrochemical paintbrush" that deposits tiny lines of metal on surfaces.
Yet, looking back, Cohen comments that "I don't think this project is too
tough for anybody." The key is being willing to devote a lot of time to the
task, he says. He worked an hour or two a day for 8 months to build his STM.
Other high schoolers have tackled STM projects, but usually as teams. At the
Peddie School in Hightstown, N.J., for instance, a dozen seniors worked
through the 19971998 school year with their physics teacher Nicholas R.
Guilbert to design and build an STM. This spring, however, they donned their
caps and gowns without having seen a single atom. Despite the disappointment
of not finishing, "we learned an awful lot," Guilbert says. "The whole idea
of tunneling gets into the quantum world, which for high school students is
a real mystery."
"The almost revolutionary part of this," Russell says, is that "it has
opened up imaging and measuring on a small scale to everyone." —P.W.
---------------------------------------------------
Zeb Haradon (zebharadon@hotmail.com)
My personal webpage:
http://www.inconnect.com/~zharadon/ubunix
A movie I'm directing:
http://www.elevatormovie.com
"Fish fuck in it." - W. C. Fields answer to why he never drank water.
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