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The students used a
blank hydrogen terminated silicon chip as the canvas. They oxidized the
silicon canvas with an atomically sharp tip through the application of
short voltage pulses as they scanned the surface.
In
creating the flag, the SPM Group used an atomic force microscope
developed and built at Bilkent for nanolithography. The microscopes
developed by the group have been commercialized by the first
nanotechnology spin-offs in Turkey, located at Cyberpark. The
nanolithography module of the microscope software was developed by
NanoSis at Cyberpark in collaboration with the SPM Group students. These
unique microscopes have been sold to leading universities like MIT and
Oxford and research labs like Seagate Technology and Los Alamos National
Laboratory.
The SPM
Group’s roots go back to early days at Bilkent. In 1989 the group built
the first scanning probe microscope in Turkey in connection with a
master’s thesis project in the Physics Department. The students in the
group believe "there is plenty of room at the bottom." Their nano-patterning
method can be perfected to write even smaller lines to develop
nanosensors and nanodevices for novel applications. The group hopes to
advance their technique to encompass molecular- and atomic-level
manipulation and measurement of miniscule forces between atoms and
molecules.
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