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Science

Nano Logo 70

Posted by emmett from the emmett-finally-gets-a-nano-story-before-hemos dept.
leb writes "More useless but fun innovations in nanotech - University of Massachusetts physicist Mark Tuominen may have some trouble finding a T-shirt small enough for the UMass logo recently sketched in his lab. Tuominen and graduate student Mustafa Bal recently created a UMass logo which is roughly the size of a red blood cell - some six micrometers in diameter. Full story and images available from the UMass News office."
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Nano Logo

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  • Jeff, did emmett scoop you? Sorry for the apparent troll attempt, but I usually appreciate the perspective that hemos puts forth when it comes to nanotech stories. IMO, it would be pretty cool if /. editors stuck to their specialties.

    Hey, who would have thought that two people could possibly think the same thing was interesting? I'm interested in nanotech, too. That's why I posted the story.

    Emmett Plant

  • Jeff, did emmett scoop you? Sorry for the apparent troll attempt, but I usually appreciate the perspective that hemos puts forth when it comes to nanotech stories. IMO, it would be pretty cool if /. editors stuck to their specialties.

    General Disclaimer: I know that this was submitted by a /. reader/participant, but I'm still not convinced that "emmett" is not an editorial 'bot and wanted to I give hemos a fair shot at one of his favorite subjects...

  • Actually, both these thoughts ran through my mind until I read the blurb. And I was still mistaken when I hit the link for the pics. I thought I was going to see the coat of arms of UMass.



    Achieving that level of detail in 6um would have been really impressive!



  • Alumni (Score:1)

    by Byteme ( 6617 )
    For those of you that do not know: UMASS has the #1 ranked Polymer Science department in the nation. I was a Microbiology grad from there. James F. Bickford Sys Dev Assistant Electronic Interface Support

  • Nanoo? (Score:1)

    by vr ( 9777 )
    nanoo, nanoo!
  • Since I first saw it I have been impressed by the picture [ibm.com] of IBM written in Xenon atoms on Nickel.
    Now, as the era of nanotechnology gets nearer and nearer, I would like to have a poster sized copy of this for my wall. Anyone know where I can get this (or any other STM pictures or photomicrographs)

  • Anyone have any pointers to good companies to invest in to get in at the start of this technology?
    The prime ones would seem to be the likes of IBM, Motorola, biotech companies like Genentech and Celera, but who else? Unfortunately Zyvex are not a publicly traded company.
  • How would you know you didn't lose it? ;-)
  • So how long until think geek will carry nano logos of tux on a necklace?

  • Hmph. (Score:1)

    by Grit ( 18830 )
    Who cares about logos? I want some nano LEGOS!
  • Ok, so how long til I can write my own tiny little logos with a $250 printer?
  • It's great to see Mark Tuominen [umass.edu] getting such good press. I had a class with him as an undergraduate and I worked in his lab for a summer. His Mesoscopic Physics lab is a great place. There is always a good group of graduate and undergraduate students working on interesting projects. The thing that makes him stand out from some other researchers, though, is the attention he gives his undergraduates. The synergy between these different areas (undergraduate, graduate, and research) is a great example of how education at a University is supposed to work.
  • Damn, misread the headline. And here I was thinking, "Great, now I too can get in on this nano-technology and build cool stuff!" Oh, well.

    Skippy
  • About 5 years ago IBM used a Tunnelling Electron Microscope to create their logo using Xenon atoms:

    http://www.englib.cornell.edu/SciTech/s95/atom.h tml

  • IBM has done some really neat molecule size atomic artwork. They figured out how to move atoms with a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) and then arranged them on a substrate to write the IBM logo, among other things.

    Forget the IBM logo, that's just art. Look instead at the quantum corrals [ibm.com]. I'm teaching quantum mechanics this semester and used two of the images since they are perfect examples of a 2-D particle in a box, one of the simplest QM systems you can solve analytically. The second of the images is so good you can even tell the quantum state of the electron. (nx = 3, n5 = 5)

    Eric

  • infamous "Bill Sux" tag on the chip

    Which, alas, proved to be a hoax :(

    Was the nano-guitar built for mini-elvis?
    --

  • 6 microns across eh? What about 0.18 micron

    Look at the resolution, easily 30 to 100 across.

    That would make it about 0.06 to 0.18 microns per dot
  • Brings a whole new meaning to the term "small print"
  • Hey, remember that scene in Blade Runner when Deckard has the piece of snake skin examined, and the expert detects a nano logo on it?
    I always hated this scene becaue I thought is was a silly idea. Now reality has caught up with it.
    Like in the movie, artists, painters etc. can pour a bag of nano logo particles into their paint to mark their work. Print the lot number onto them and dump them into the chocolate bar you are producing, so that you can trace back even the slightest amount of it back to its origin. Mix nanologo particles into a car's paint so that the serial number is everywhere on the car, not just imprinted into the engine block. Mass produced nano logo particles could be used to make dollar bills, ID cards etc. harder to falsify. I'm sure there hundreds of ideas more what you can do with it, besides making integrated circuits.

  • Does this mean that to be good at nano tech the organization you work for needs to have a very simple (or maybe a very complex) logo. Just think of all those great scientist who work for companies with photographs or similar for logos - looks like they will have to wait a while for the right technology to come along.
  • Thought it said 'Nano Lego'. Now -that- would be cool :)
  • RTFA, This is completely different.

    The IBM logo was done by pushing the atoms around. This is more `automatic' and suited for mass production. Sure, it isn't the smallest ever, but this is another step towards functional nanotech.

    -jay
  • The now-empty channels show up as orange areas on a yellow background. The UMass researchers have successfully filled the holes with metal, a major step toward creating usable electronic devices.

    Maybe someone can explain this to me, but the fact that they can fill a very inexact mold with medal really doesn't show me that they are close to producing electronic devices. The individual partitions of the mold seem to be of a fixed shape, so the ability to cast exact electronic parts seems to be very limited. Could someone please tell me how far away useful nano-technology is? How far away are we from being able to duplicate the power and functionality of a cell? When will we have the most hyped use of this new class of devices, nano-sized robots that can do custom drug delivery? It doesn't sound like we are even close

  • It is not the size of the logo that's impressive here, it's the resolution. The polymer they used is the key factor behind this - if the grains of the material that they expose to e-beam lithography are small enough then the resolution will be high.

    The polymer they talk about seems to have long chains standing out from the surface, each forming a very small dot that can be exposed. Pretty neat.

    -Erik Aderstedt

  • While I totally agree this isn't really worthy of the tag "nano" it does have some similarities with what Drexler's vision is. The logo was made from custom-made polymers which had certain properties which allowed them to self-assemble into the required shape. I think that's why this is being pushed as nano, but maybe I'm just reading more into this than whoever wrote the article. Probably - "hey it's small, it must be nano!"

  • Is the first thing anyone ever does with this sort of fancy new technology is to create a fancy little logo? I mean, you'd almost think they were actually frustrated artists :) This must have taken far longer to do than just a simple pattern or whatever. Maybe the extra grant money from the US government means we'll be seeing a whole load more minature pictures...

  • Didnt IBM commit the first act of atomic vandalism? Years ago i say a story on this, with B&W images of an IBM name appearing as peaks on a stark background... Ahh well. Let UMass have its glory, but Big Blue did it first. "One day the world will need only five atoms, and only the worlds richest five atoms will be able to afford them".

  • I seem to recall a couple of years ago in New Scientist that IBM (or some such company) had successfully created a nano-engine. The point was that the scientists had decided to use steam power because it was more efficient at such small sizes.

    They used a tiny spot of water, which was heated and then this produced work (perhaps pushing a piston?). Has any more information been published?

    As for practical uses of this, I think that real-life applications of any nano-technology are many years off!

    foxtrot

  • not lego, logo.

    Make Seven

  • Didn't IBM write their logo out in dot-matrix, where the dots were atoms? I think that was five years ago too. Unfortunately, I don't have the link. It wasn't very exciting then either.

  • Theught it was abeut minituarised Lego.

    New, that weuld be kewl;)
  • 6 microns across eh? What about 0.18 micron (and upcoming 0.12u) wafer fab technology? What's the big deal?
  • Hey, I *would* wear it...



    --Hikari
  • Yup, that was them. Two of their researchers won the Nobel prize for the invention of the Scanning Tunnel Microsope, which also allowed individual atoms to be moved about. They then had the bad taste to use their invention to write the name "IBM" in what looked like ancient dot matrix print, but which was in fact individual atoms. If I remember correctly it was 6 atoms high. This sure beat 6 microns!
  • The IBM logo was first written with a Scanning Tunnel Microscope a few atoms high in 1989. The case that everyone here is mentioning 5 years ago was the first time they wrote the IBM logo at room temperature with an STM. Prior to that the jitter due to thermal effects caused the atoms in the logo to be misplaced, so the samples had to be cooled done to -270c (liquid nitrogen). You can check the IBM press release here [ibm.com].

    I also just looked up that Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd Karl Binnig won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1986 for the invention of the STM. They were working for the IBM research labs in germany at the time.

  • Is it just me or does it bug anyone else that they wrote that it was "6 micrometers". 6 micrometers all lined up next to each other would be pretty big...6 microns would not.
  • ... well I guess that's exactly the point. The news release(who said that news offices are really something good?) focuses completely on the wrong part of the story. Creating structures on micron scales is rather boring - and you wouldn't need those fancy block-co-polymers for that anyway.

    What's more interesting is the creation of a ordered structure on a nanometer scale (which is a bit a pain in the neck as those blocks usually align parallel to the surface of the film (due to a preferential interaction of the block components and the surfaces...) - but Tom and his guys managed to get them change their minds ;-) (amazing how motivating E fields can be...) and stand vertically - it's quite amazing to see those well ordered nano-structured surfaces (http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/photos/breaking%2 0news/UMlogodetail1-300.jpg).

    As none of the block components is really conductive... you need to take out the ones which formed the cylinders (keep the rest) and fill the holes with a metal... sounds easy, eh? It isn't.... The last time I tried to fill a hole of 20 nm diameter with a metal I just buried the hole under a nice layer of metal :( .... (wrong story I guess). Anyway... what you end up with is an array of wires (I think Mark & Tom already managed a length of a few microns) and a diameter of a few nanomters.... I think that's cool....

    ... what's nice about it is, that unlike those pretty images some people had been speaking about (HAL, right?) where the atoms had to be moved 1 by 1... this technique allows the generation of thousands of rather well controlled nano wires, just by self assembly of a polymer.... I'd think that's already quite a step to an application.

    .... anywayz... written already 2 much again oo
  • Yeh, thats the 1st thing I thought. It would be an excellent idea, make a nanotech turtle.

    Or maybe one that could understand postscript would be neater...

  • No, I saw the words "Nano Logo", and thought that Hemos wanted a new logo for the nanotech postings. I was almost aiming for the Gimp until I read the rest of the letters in the story... And it wasn't even posted by Hemos.

  • no seriously, I'd manufacture one nano-logo and embed it in say a 3" cube of clear plastic, maybe visible with a certain power microscope - and sell 'em in bookstores maybe with a little booklet about nano-tech - hey, if people bought pet rocks and chunks of the Berlin Wall....

    Major Major Major Major
  • IBM has done some really neat molecule size atomic artwork. They figured out how to move atoms with a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) and then arranged them on a substrate to write the IBM logo, among other things.

    You can check some out here [ibm.com]. There are also tons of other pictures there with some short explanations. Definitely worth a browse.

  • Maybe the extra grant money from the US government means we'll be seeing a whole load more minature pictures...

    The proposed additional US funding for nanotech research is probably why we're seeing this picture. It's probably grant posturing, just like the press release from Sandia Labs a couple of weeks ago. I've seen a couple of other releases like like this, too. (Including a really pathetic effort out of Worcester Polytechnic Institute that intentionally or unintentionally confused MEMS with nanotechnology.)

  • Blah. Am I the only one who thinks at this very moment K. Eric Drexler is coming down from Cambridge to kick the asses of the whinies from UMass who are misusing his pet phrase, "nano"? This doesn't seem particularly useful or innovative. Especially considering that there already exists 0.11 micron etching technology, by traditional means. Now, the day I hear about an UMass logo 0.11 microns across, then I'll be impressed.
  • You already can. Microfiche already has the capacity to do that, and that's nowhere near the highest density available.
  • How about a bunch of nano-turtles pushing bits around on a chip (literally), following LOGO microcode, emulating an 8088? That'd be a kick.

    Sorry, I get a kick out of perverse forms of computation like that... Someday I'm going to build a web server that runs on marbles...
  • Now what would be neat is if I could get the entire last year's slashdot headlines in the palm of my hand... with all comments ;-)
  • Now scientists are working on a life size picture of the average /.'er troll brain.

    This work should take about five years to finish due to the average being dragged down over the last few days.

    sparkes


    *** www.linuxuk.co.uk relaunches 1 Mar 2000 ***

  • heh. Logo (Score:3)

    by dieman ( 4814 ) on Friday February 11, 2000 @01:28AM (#1286051) Homepage
    Heck, did anyone else see Nano Logo and think--

    WHAT!?! They got a LOGO intrepreter to interact with a nanotech device?!?! :)

    Could you imagine the little bugger thinge booping around to some logo commands? Whoops, did I just put that one up your nose?

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