DIY Scanning-Tunneling-Microscope 26
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.
How interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How interesting (Score:1, Insightful)
Prof. Fuchs - which is in German means Fox. So his name is Mr. Fox. What's your point?
Now THIS is News for Geeks! (Score:5, Insightful)
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! (Score:2)
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?
Hey, didn't you get the message? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Hey, didn't you get the message? (Score:1)
diy not unusual in science (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:diy not unusual in science (Score:1)
With the current (passe yet?) media flirtation with the chimera of nanotechnology, a project like this has more direct appeal. If you can construct from plans or a kit, or even buy for the price of a non-professional optical microscope or telescope a working STM/AFM, I think that's really something. Probe microscopes are a particularly good case for pursuing this DIY approach because they are fundamentally quite simple, and the images they create can be, on a superficial level, immediately understandable.
-- graham
its been done before (Score:1, Interesting)
he wasn't that good, but local news stations brought cameras to watch him play after he won the westinghouse.
adam cohen [mit.edu]
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.
Re:its been done before (Score:2)
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.
Interesting GPL-ish licensing (Score:2, Informative)
From their "Licences and Legal Stuff" page [uni-muenster.de]:
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:Tripod piezo configurations are passe (Score:1)
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
Nanotech for the masses (Score:1)
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 [bitscope.com] which seems to have captured quite a following. In a different vein, the Intel Play QX3 [intelplay.com] 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