1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) : fabricating the nanoworld
Interesting. Thanks for the answer!
Comment by xozorada92 at 15/09/2023 at 12:29 UTC
3 upvotes, 2 direct replies
No problem! I'll also add that scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) would be the more obvious candidate for atom-by-atom 3D printing. People have been picking up and placing single atoms with STM for a quite while now. Most famously, the [IBM logo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_(atoms%5C[1])) back in 1989!
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_(atoms%5C
But then, that means STM has been an obvious candidate for atomic printing since the 80's, and I've still never seen anything close to building 3D structures, much less doing anything at scale. So I guess there must be significant practical challenges there, but I'm less familiar with that.