17.01.2014 Views

Thesis-PDF - IAP/TU Wien

Thesis-PDF - IAP/TU Wien

Thesis-PDF - IAP/TU Wien

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

theory (see e.g. [1]).<br />

Now I call our times exciting, because we can build upon this hard work that<br />

has already been done, providing the foundations for understanding how particles<br />

interact and what effects have to be taken into account for a particular problem.<br />

As soon as such a collection of physical laws is in place, statements of the kind "It<br />

should be possible to do this and that" can be made. Ideas of what is possible can<br />

be derived from what we know. A theoretical prediction in this sense is nothing else<br />

than a statement that it should be possible to do this and that (the experiment)<br />

and obtain a certain result. The reasoning has been done a priori, before we carry<br />

out the actual experiment, the real thing.<br />

This is not something new and I will cite here a statement that has been made<br />

quite some time ago (in 1959) by a well know physicist - Richard Feynman (1918-<br />

1988). He stated "..there exists no reason why we shouldn’t be able to write the<br />

entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin.." ([2]), while he discussed the<br />

idea that the laws of physics do not oppose the intentional manipulation of single<br />

atoms, assembling them as one wishes. Back then however, there was no imaging<br />

method having atomic resolution, and even less a way to manipulate single atoms<br />

in a controlled way.<br />

Then, in 1981, with the invention of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope<br />

(STM) (see Chapter 3) it was for the first time possible to directly acquire images<br />

of solid surfaces with atomic resolution. Along with the STM came the possibility<br />

to move atoms across a surface one by one. Since then the science of the small<br />

has seen explosive growth - Nanotechnology. For phenomena at the nanoscale,<br />

the tiniest realm of nature, we can today rephrase those statements (with good<br />

chances to find answers) of what should be possible into "How can we build, what<br />

we think is possible?".<br />

This is an extraordinary position to be in - We now can try out what could<br />

only be hypothesized before. The past two and a half decades have extended the<br />

knowledge and techniques greatly and the range of what seems possible to do is<br />

almost frightening. A new scientific continent is waiting to be discovered, rich<br />

in concepts, applications and deep consequences that reach too far than can be<br />

predicted beyond the near future.<br />

1.2 Complexity<br />

As soon as real systems have to be investigated, understood and built, a new challenge<br />

arises. In order to apply ideas from physics to progressively larger and more<br />

complicated structures, the interactions between many elementary constituents<br />

9

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!