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New Technique For 2D Imaging Of Nanostructures

Posted by timothy on from the good-things-small-packages dept.

NanotechNews.com writes: "It seems that researchers (One of those is Norm Bartelt) at the U.S. Department of Energy?s Sandia National Laboratory have created a new way to represent self-assembling nanostructures (The bottom up approach of nanotechnology). They can record in real time, real space (real time video) the nanostructures, which self-assemble and transform. They used a low-energy electron microscope (LEEM). Furthermore the core of the news is: "Theorists long have believed that competing attractive and repulsive inter-atomic interactions can lead to the spontaneous formation of ordered patterns in widely varying chemical and physical systems. Potentially, such patterns could be used as templates for nanostructure fabrications.""

3 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is this completely nuts? by matrix0040 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The problem there is that at that small resolution you cannot trust what you see. There's a basic limit expressed in terms of Heisenberg uncertainity principle which states that if u know the position then u can't know the velocity. So theres a trade off there. So it's not possible to move nanoscale structures around .

  2. Matter replication? by gnovos · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How far is 2-D from 3-D (or at least multiple layers of 2-D) nanostructures? And then how far from those 3-D nano-structures to 3-D human-touchable sized structures? Primitive matter replication may not be that far away folks, and if you think there are problems now with digital copy protection laws, you ain't seen nuthin yet!

    Imagine the chaos to come when a dollar bill, or a stock certificate, or a strand of DNA can be copied perfectly, a molecular twin of the original...

    I don't know if we are headed for utopia or armageddon, but at least it's going to be an interesting trip! :)

    --
    "Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
  3. Re:Money replication? by Darth+Paul · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Why talk about money, when such a technology would make money obselete?

    Indeed, maybe you could take this a step further and say that a replicator would abolish the concept of "economy" as we know it.

    Economy is based on "scarcity", that resources are limited, money being a way of measuring relative worths (albeit poorly). Take that away, and money loses its representative power.

    I can think of three possible replacement currencies: 1) Respect 2) Services and 3) Willingness to use replicated weapons.