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...

Now THIS is News for Geeks!

[pedro]

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!

Re:Now THIS is News for Geeks!

[Rick the Red]

Actually, that's "News for Nerds" :-)

I am way impressed with this work. At first I thought it would be something totally beyond the means of anyone outside a university physics lab, but this looks do-able at the high school level! Way cool, very impressive, can't praise it enough.

But does it impress women?

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.

Interesting GPL-ish licensing

[iiii]

I find their GPL-ish licensing (but only for "private or educational" purposes) to be pretty cool.

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.

Re:its been done before

[Captn Pepe]

Yeah, Adam's a bright kid, but sadly when I met him at the '97 ISEF I got the distinct impression that all his success had made him a seriously cocky hotshot. I suppose he may have improved, but he certainly wouldn't have been easy to work with then.

Anyway, I read the copy of his Westinghouse paper that he gave me, and frankly he won on the technical chutzpah of building a STM in his garage, not for any special insightfulness. He was just so proud of himself for making an STM-quality damping system out of Legos and bungee cords, that he didn't even realize that he'd pretty much totally failed to make his "electrochemical paintbrush" actually work. Nor do I think he understood why his idea wouldn't work for nanoscale lithography in the first place.

What I'm trying to point out is that out in the real world, bright kids are a dime a dozen -- hell, I was one, and going to a college a lot harder than Harvard, where I was barely average, was an amazingly sobering experience -- but being bright doesn't mean squat unless you learn to take criticism, work collaboratively, and refine ideas. Even in academic research, there's little room for hotshots, and I worry that all the fawning and praise that got heaped on this kid will make him stay just that.

That said, last I checked Adam was studying in Cambridge on a Marshall scholarship, so I suppose there's hope. Whether he learns how to work in the real world, or becomes one of the very few successful hotshots, I don't know.