DIY Scanning-Tunneling-Microscope

Anonymous Coward writes "Quote: To give everybody an opportunity to make his own "hands on" experience with the Nanoworld we provide all information to build up and use some of the standard equipment of this fascinating field of science, starting with the Nobel-Prize-Winner of 1986: the Scanning-Tunneling-Microscope (STM). Just follow these handy Instructions" While construction of a stm from these instructions isn't cake, it will give you a good idea of what goes into the building of such an instrument.

Comments

How interesting

[dimator]

Interesting CAD drawings... Particularly the professor's name, in the lower right...

diy not unusual in science

[!splut]

I'll admit that it is pretty impressive that they've got something that works with such a simple design like this, but do-it-yourself isn't really an unusual phenomenon in academia.

When people (well, science students, grad students, and professionals, at least) think of scientific instruments, they tend to picture big complicated NMR machines, mass spec devices, HPLC systems, so on and so forth, with proprietary interface and database software, and service contracts that run tens of thousands of dollars a year.

These big instruments are manufactured and supported by huge corporations or little startups, and either way, the manufacturer will only design and produce (and support!) these devides if there is a sizable consumer demand - something to make it economically worthwhile to try and fill the niche. But for any given technology, there was a time before that particular technology was commonplace and mass-produced.

HPLC systems, NMR devices, CD spectrometers, X-ray crystallographic devices... (I'm a biochemist, so I apologize if my examples are skewed in that direction) these all started out as projects imposed on graduate students by research advisors in some budding new field. These first pioneering instruments, which worked well enough in many cases to generate fantastic data, had to be slapped together from off-the-shelf components and with a tight budget in mind.

Not to detract from the oo's and aaah's, but its good to keep things in perspective.

its been done before

[r0b0t b0y]

i was in this dude's basketball PE class in high school.

he wasn't that good, but local news stations brought cameras to watch him play after he won the westinghouse.

adam cohen

what's most incredible was that building the STM wasn't even the main point of his project. he just needed it to see what he was creating.