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It should surprise no one that a man who restores cars in his spare time would be adept at taking apart and building other mechanisms too. But handy doesn't even begin to describe Don Eigler, a physicist and confessed instrumentation jockey who designed and built one of the world's most extraordinary laboratory instruments, a microscope capable not only of imaging atoms, but of building new structures using individual atoms as the building blocks.
Why would a computer company care about atoms? For one thing, the future of information technology depends on being able to build ever smaller electronic devices on semiconductor chips. Being able to build structures at the atomic level gives IBM researchers an opportunity to explore the potential of really small electronic devices.
The microscope that Eigler built is a specialized Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) which allows samples to be prepared and studied in ultra high vacuum and at liquid helium temperature, just four degrees above absolute zero. The Scanning Tunneling Microscope, a Nobel Prize-winning invention of two IBM scientists in the IBM Research Division's Zurich laboratory, is an instrument which can create atomic resolution images of surfaces by tracing out the shape of a surface with a needle. By cooling the samples down to very low temperatures at which atoms tend to hold still, Eigler was capable of demonstrating that the needle of the microscope could also be used as a tool to position individual on a surface.
In 1989, Eigler used his STM to spell out the letters "I-B-M", demonstrating the ability to position individual atoms with atomic-scale precision. Since then, his group has demonstrated the ability to construct custom molecules and even to operate an electrical switch whose only moving part is a single atom. Eigler and his collaborators have learned to create a new kind of electron trap called a "quantum corral" which allows them to visualize and study the quantum mechanical properties of electrons which are confined to dimensions which are as small as possible future electronic devices.
Eigler joined IBM in 1986 after completing his post-doctoral work at Bell Labs and getting his Ph.D. in physics at the University of California, San Diego (while surfing in his spare time).
In his free moments these days, Eigler enjoys classic science fiction, backpacking in the Sierra Nevada and, of course, restoring cars. He lives in the redwood-forested Santa Cruz mountains with his wife Roslyn and their two dogs.
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