NanoBits: grab a piece of the nano building kit

If you ever played with those plastic toy kits as a kid, you may wanna see this. We prefabricated nanoscale needles, to be picked up by nanogrippers inside a scanning electron microscope. These nanobits are then used as ultralong tips in "Atomic Force Microscopes".

The needles are called "Nanobits" - because they remind us of drill bits; you can have a library of different "nanobits" and then pick the one you want, and mount it where you want it.

This is a part of a project funded by the European Commission, a very cool nanorobot/manufacturing collaboration called "Nanohand".

The nanobits were designed and fabricated by R. T. Rajendra Kumar, Hassan Uddin Shaik and Peter Bøggild from Technical University of Denmark, and the manipulation and AFM scanning was done by Volkmar Eichhorn and coworkers from Oldenburg University.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Nanomanipulation
• Nanorobotics
• Nanobits
• Electron Microscope
• Nanoassembly
• Nanomanufacturing

[blacklinen99]

Awesome work! Is the geometry at the end effector known? I know it's more useful than tips for narrow spaces, but do you think you could improve sensitivity -- And get closer to the ideal tip -- by growing, say, a well-known structure on the end effector, whose geometry you know and can simulate before the experiments? Has anybody tried doing that to solve the great unknown in scanning probe microscopy (The tip)?

[NanoClips]

@blacklinen99 i tell you, a lot of hard work is going into making all sorts of tips: magnetic tips, ultra sharp tips, hollow tips, waveguiding tips, dual tips... scanning probe microscopy is wonderfully diverse. We are right now trying to use Focused Ion Beam milling to make exactly customised tips. We will upload some videos soon that show how you can sculpt these tine structures in real time. With such small structures finding out what the tip shape exactly is can only be done by TEM...

[NanoClips]

@NanoClips sorry for not answering before, for some reasons the notifications (when someone asks something) are now guided to my junk folder... . )(#¤)#(/¤

[NanoClips]

Exactly! Very small spells, that is :)

[NanoClips]

Yey, we have now a big european funded project to get this to work well. Much (!) more to come. ..

[covertoperations1000]

thats weeny weeny ,teenie tiny..........very clever too......

[TheCarmacon]

simply amazing

[MrEdobob]

Jesus did that!!!

[LSDjTutorials]

Aha, FIB as glue!

[NanotechMovies]

With a really really good microscope its actually possible to use the grippers, but it is harder, and the smallest structures are very difficult if not impossible to resolve. There is another clip which shows manipulation of a 200 nm wire using a very good optical lens

[ryanrule2]

the graininess in the video? thats not grain, thats the actual electrons being used to image this stuff hitting the detector.

[gaeshue]

@unarmed1234

find "gaeshue" on Soundcloud and find the track "Trickery" (from album "Apart")