3D printing is profoundly transforming many fields, ranging from design to medicine to space exploration. And if the results of this revolution will continue to emerge for decades, there are already those who are thinking of doing better: “printing” not objects, but atoms. It is what its inventors, a team of researchers from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, call synthescope, a technology that uses electron microscopy to manipulate the composition of new materials at an atomic level, and therefore provide new materials “on demand”. physical or chemical characteristics.
Print the individual atoms
The synthesizer designed in the Oak Ridge laboratories was born from the technology underlying the scanning and transmission electron microscope (or Stem), a model of electron microscope that allows the individual atoms of the analyzed samples to be visualized. It works by focusing a beam of electrons on a point smaller than an atom, and thus scanning the sample you want to analyze. By its nature, this form of microscopy damages the materials on which it is used, and it is this characteristic that the American researchers decided to exploit to create their synthesizer: creating “holes” just large enough to contain a single atom, and then filling them with the desired element.
“We are exploring different methods to create these defects when we want, so we can place them where we want,” explains Stephen Jesse, lead scientist of the team carrying out the research. “Since Stems have atomic-scale resolution capabilities, and we work with very thin materials just a couple of atoms thick, we can see the position of each atom. We are therefore able to manipulate matter on an atomic scale and in real time: this is the goal, and we are really achieving it.”
How the syntoscope works
In fact, until now no one had ever managed to produce systems capable of controlling the composition of new materials with a precision that reached the level of individual atoms. In a series of four scientific works published in recent months, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have demonstrated that their technique works, and that once mature it could truly revolutionize the production of nano- and meta-materials with unique characteristics.
The field in which the inventors of the syntoscope see the most direct applications is that of quantum computation: computers, sensors, and communication systems that exploit the oddities of quantum mechanics to carry out calculations, measurements and transmit information in a safe way, much more effectively than what cannot be done today with conventional devices.
The quantum revolution
The scale at which quantum phenomena are most apparent is the atomic one, and therefore the synthesizer could open the doors to a real technological revolution. “The simple fact of finally being able to position the atoms where we prefer allows us to create atomic structures so precise and with atoms in such a close position that we can make them enter entanglement, i.e. make them share the same quantum properties – underlines Ondrej Dyck, physicist materials that he contributed to research – and this is the key to being able to create quantum devices more powerful than conventional ones”.
Quantum computation, as we were saying, is therefore the first test bed in which the synthesizer will be applied. However, it is not the only one: microelectronics, chemistry, the creation of materials with unusual optical or structural properties, are all applications in which the possibility of manipulating the atomic structure with extreme precision could give revolutionary results.