ENME Webcast Spring 2006
Leaders in Mechanical Engineering Lecture Series
Friday, April 14, 2006, at 2:00pm
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Title: Assembly at the Nanoscale
Ari Requicha, Ph.D · University of Southern California,
Director of the Laboratory for Molecular Robotics
Abstract: This talk discusses bottom up assembly of nanoscale components. We begin by addressing nanoassembly by manipulation with SPMs (Scanning Probe Microscopes), which is a relatively well established process for prototyping nanosystems. Experimental results are presented which show that SPM manipulation can be used with minimal user intervention to accurately and reliably position molecular-sized components.
These can then be linked by chemical or physical means to form subassemblies, which in turn can be further manipulated. Applications in building wires, single-electron transistors and nanowaveguides are presented. Finally, we discuss an emerging paradigm in self-assembly, in which active elements (nanorobots) are used to build nanostructures. These robots have the limited capabilities we expect to find in the nanorobots of the future, and achieve interesting global behaviors through local interactions. Simulation results show that arbitrary shapes can be constructed by swarms of these robots.
