Poster (pdf)

Lecture Open to the Public

by Ellen D. Williams

Distinguished University Professor

edw@umd.edu, Department of Physics, University of Maryland

 7:30 pm Friday Feb. 15^th

Flint Hills Room, Student Union, Kansas State University

Keynote address for the ADVANCE workshop in Women in Science and Engineering www.phys.ksu.edu/advance

Twenty-five years ago, the invention of a new scientific instrument, the scanning tunneling microscope, created a scientific revolution allowing scientists to visualize and even manipulate individual atoms.  The new capability, and the new perspectives that followed from its use, led to the new discipline of nanoscience and its attendant applications in nanotechnology.  Nanoscience is the study of materials with nanometer scale structure - however the nanoscale world is not a scaled-down version of the macroscopic world.  Nanoscale structures have special properties by virtue of their smallness alone, which include quantum confinement, high surface-to-volume ratio and susceptibility to fluctuations

In this talk, I will discuss the discovery and development of scanning tunneling microscopy, and show its use in observing individual atoms moving in nanoscale structures.  I will discuss the connection to electronic devices, where the junctions that control device performance are reaching nanoscale size.  The seemingly random motion of atoms at such nanoscale junctions will create specific signatures and behaviors more similar to signal transmission in biology than in traditional solid-state electronics.

In addition to discussing my research in seeing atoms, I will discuss impact of changing attitudes in women’s participation in science on my career. When I began graduate school at Caltech, formal admission of women had only been allowed there for a few years. 

Acknowledgment

* Support for this work has been provided by the NSF-MRSEC and the Laboratory for Physical Science, NIST, and the UMD-CNAM.