Nanoscale Engineering of Structures and Devices on Surfaces

The relentless increase in both density and speed that has characterized microelectronics, and now nanoelectronics, will require a new paradigm to continue beyond current technologies. One proposed such paradigm shift demands the ultimate control over the number and position of dopants in a device, which includes quantum information processing and variety of semiconductor device materials and architectures aimed at solving end-of-Moore's law issues. Such a work requires the development of a tool for the design of atomically precise devices on silicon and other surfaces, in hope of studying the effect of local interactions between atomic-scale structures, their microscopic behavior, and how quantum mechanical effects might influence nano-device behavior in very small structures. Demonstrations of remarkable 2D nanostructures down to single atom devices are reported here thanks to the development of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) as an imaging and patterning tool. These include the formation of molecular chiral superstructures on metallic surfaces, as well as the atomic-scale depassivation of a hydrogen terminated surface with an STM, toward the incorporation of dopants in silicon. I will spend some time at the end, talking about my experience working at a national laboratory.\\[4pt] Acknowledgments: This work was performed, in part, at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, a U.S. DOE, Office of Basic Energy Sciences user facility. The work was supported by the Sandia National Laboratories LDRD Program. Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed-Martin Company, for the U. S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC04-94AL85000. Use of the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory was supported by the U.S. DOE, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.