There s still plenty of room at the bottom

Transcription

1 There s still plenty of room at the bottom Foundations of the nanotechnology revolution Ross Lockwood Department of Physics February 4, 2014

2 Richard Feynman Born May 11th, 1918, in Far Rockaway, New York Attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received a bachelor s degree in Pictured here with Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann

3 The Manhattan Project Worked with Hans Bethe, Neils Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer. Led a the computation group, which at the time consisted of a team of human calculators. Witnessed the first atomic bomb test with the naked eye.

4 Nobel Prize Following the war, Feynman turned down a position at the Institute for Advanced Study, home of Einstein, Gödel and von Neumann. Followed Hans Bethe to Cornell, but later accepted a position at Caltech, where he did his prize winning work on Quantum Electrodynamics, for which he won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.

5 The Challenger Explosion Feynman was asked to join the commission investigating the Challenger Explosion in Feynman demonstrated that the SRB o-rings became brittle at low temperatures by dipping an o-ring into ice water. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

6 More on Feynman Feynman preserved many personal anecdotes in his autobiography, Surely You re Joking Mr. Feynman. Authored many texts on physics and philosophy, like Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals that are still used as teaching aids today.

7 There s Plenty of Room at the Bottom In 1959, Feynman gave his famous lecture, considered the conceptual beginnings of the field of nanotechnology. Promulgated the idea of manipulating individual atoms and the notion of chemical synthesis by mechanical manipulation.

8 Historical Preface The first commercial Transmission Electron Microscope was introduced in In 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, NASA was formed in The first germanium transistor was demonstrated in 1947, in silicon in In 1959, Texas Instruments commercialized the first integrated electronic circuit.

9 1959 As soon as I mention this, people tell me about miniaturization, and how far it has progressed today. They tell me about electric motors that are the size of the nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market, they tell me, by which you can write the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin. But that's nothing; that's the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction.

10 Feynman s Video Clip Originally given in 1959, this clip is from a 1984 lecture at a seminar called Idiosyncratic Thinking. v=4ercygdw--c#t=0m47s

11 I have estimated how many letters there are in the Encyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10 15 ). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is plenty of room at the bottom! Don't tell me about microfilm!

12 Feynman s Challenges At the end of Feynman s talk he issued two challenges and a $1000 prize for each. 1) Build a working electric motor that is 1/64th (~0.4 mm) of an inch on a side, controllable from the outside. 2) Write a page of text in an area 1/25,000th smaller in linear scale.

13 William McLellan The first challenge was met less than 6 months later, when William McLellan demonstrated a motor less than 1/64th of an inch on a side. Feynman was disappointed that the challenge was met without any new machining techniques.

14 Tom Newman It took 25 years before, in 1985, Tom Newmann, a graduate student at Stanford used electron beam lithography to write the first page of Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

15 The Connection Machine In 1983, Danny Hillis was a graduate student at MIT, where he engaged Feynman s son Carl, to work with him on his thesis project. Hillis envisioned a computer with a million processors, each connected to one another with a line of communication.

16 New Architectures The CM-1 and CM-2 consisted of 65,536 (2^16) 1-bit processors that could simultaneously perform a calculation. 16 processors fit onto a single chip, so 4,096 (2^12) chips were needed. Feynman s job was to come up with a way to connect the processors efficiently. Settled on a 12-D architecture, with each chip connected to 12 others.

17 12-D Hypercube

18 12-D Hypercube

19 Connection Machine

20 In Popular Culture Showcased in Apple s Think Different campaign in T-Shirt design by Danny Hillis Describes the 12-D architecture of the CM-1

21 In Use In development, Feynman wrote a demonstration program to solve problems in Quantum Chromodynamics and simulated it by hand, demonstrating the CM-1 would be faster than machines at CalTech. In April, 1985, the first program was run: Conway s Game of Life Stephen Wolfram demonstrated a program which would calculate turbulent fluid flow.

22 You know anybody who can network 8 Connection Machines and debug 2 million lines of code for what I bid for this job? Because if he can I'd like to see him try.

23 There s Still Plenty of Room at the Bottom

24 Modern Microprocessors Optical Lithography Samsung A7-28 nm High- K Metal-Gate process (Chipworks)

25 Bob Wolkow Born in late 1958 (!) BSc in 1982 (!) PhD in 1987, Postdoc in Solved the Si(100) structure in at Bell labs Now at NINT

26 Wolkow s Video Clip v=kpnvnbznmls#t=03m11s "With our human hands, through the scanning tunnelling microscope, we are not only manipulating atoms, we are manipulating electrons." (13m11s)

27 Atom Scale Electronics ualberta.ca/bobwolkow/home/ ualberta.ca/bobwolkow/home/ movies/atom-scaleelectronics-movie movies/making-a-single-atomtip

28 Quantum Cellular Automata Despite Feynman s prediction that we d be manipulating atoms by the year 2000, we are doing even better - by manipulating single electronic states in atoms. This type of device still needs plenty of research before it becomes a commercial product.

29 Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) ifixit/chipworks teardown of the iphone 4 gyroscope

30 Quantum Computers Last year D-Wave, a Canadian company, installed a D-Wave Two system in the Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab, a join project between NASA, Google and USRA. D-Wave s Quantum Computer (D-Wave) Lockheed Martin purchased an upgrade to a 512-qubit system.

31 What s the commonality? All the technology mentioned up to this point has been 2-dimensional! In 2004, Intel produced a version of its Pentium 4 chip based on 3D architechture. Samsung s new V-NAND SSD have a 24 layer structure, doubling the number of transistors per square millimeter.

32 Future Possibilities? Diamond NV-centers may be used as spin-based quantum computers. Currently, NV-centers manifest randomly, so molecular manipulation is required to move this technology forward.

33 Computronium? Computronium: a theoretical arrangement matter that is most optimal possible form of computing device for that amount of matter. What are the limits of computation? What problems should we solve?

34 Questions? I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring. - Richard Feynman, Feb 15th, 1988