Donald M. Eigler

Hubert M. James Lecture

April 4, 2001

Donald M. Eigler
IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center

"There's Plenty of Room in the Middle: A Perspective From the Bottom"

On December 29, 1959, in a now-famous and extraordinarily prescient talk titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" given at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, Richard Feynman spoke of the possibilities afforded by miniaturization. In that talk he discussed a "great future" in which "we can arrange the atoms the way we want." Feynman's "great future" arrived in 1989 with the discovery of ways to manipulate atoms with the Scanning Tunneling Microscope. In this talk I will review the progress made since then, highlighting the ways in which atom manipulation has been used as a scientific tool. I will discuss the challenges we face in building ever larger structures, the limitations we face, and the extraordinary opportunities for science and technology that would come from the routine ability to assemble atomically-precise 3D structures of nanometer size: the middle ground.