Ponente
Descripción
In the novel “The Wrench” from 1978, a chemist explains how he and his colleagues dream of building molecules, how they fantasize about tweezers with which they pick up individual parts of a molecule, hold them, and place them exactly where they are needed in a molecule. If such tweezers existed, we would be able to produce wonderful things such as only God was able to produce until now, the chemist ends his description. With the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in the 1980s, such 'tweezers', which allow individual atoms and molecules to be observed and changed, were actually realized. Such physical and chemical systems are the subject of current basic research, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, they form the basis for future technologies in information technology. We employ this technique in order to understand the properties of nanostructures and chemistry on the nanoscale. Here, I will present the fascination of experimenting with individual atoms and molecules on three examples. First, the formation of nano-snowflakes is monitored from single water molecules to fractal islands. Then, the advantage of a laser-induced over a thermally induced on-surface reaction is demonstrated. Finally, an individual molecule is manipulated that might serve as a molecular switch in future nano-electronics.
