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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.
Interesting CAD drawings... Particularly the professor's name, in the lower right...
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Very cool, and astoundingly understandable, considering that the authors aren't native english speakers.
It's so neat how they've adapted what, after all, are some fairly pedestrian and accessible tech to achieve such a noble goal!
I especially enjoyed the brute-force electrochemical solution to producing a tip.
Massively k3w1!
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
DIY science is dead, people! ;^)
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
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.
The angel in the oatmeal.
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.
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i do not use drugs, i AM drugs -- Dali
From their "Licences and Legal Stuff" page:
We grant everybody the right to construct the microscope using the here-published design for private or educational purposes. On these web pages all necessary diagrams, drawings, material descriptions and software-source-codes are published for free access. While granting the right to build the microscope we make it mandatory that new developments, improvements or other applications of our design are also made openly available for private or educational purposes.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
While its true that modern designs use the versatile quadrature tube configuration, the point in this project appears to be to keep things low cost and simple. Thus they use a parallel stacked piezo design that, for a given piezo material, must require lower voltage for a given displacement.
Thus you don't need expensive, fancy and/or potentially dangerous high-voltage amplifiers, particulary important for a do-it-yourself project where high school kids might be building the system.
-- graham
This is a great effort to bring the unnecssarily expensive current array of commercial probe microscopes to a price level more in line with hobbiest and lower-education-tier optical microscopes and telescopes. I know the guy (Andre Schirmeisen) running the show and we discussed this kind of thing since being in grad school together back in Montreal. Kudos to him and the Muenster team for making it reality.
The spread of GPL-style ideas to hardware is really interesting in the sense of community fostering. A similar story was reported in Slashdot a while back for the digital oscilloscope Bitscope which seems to have captured quite a following. In a different vein, the Intel Play QX3 optical microscope, while propriety, has spawned an active mod community. It will be interesting to see if nanotech enthusiasts pick up on the Muenster SXM project in the same way. Let's hope...
-- graham