The dawn of nanoscale science can be traced to a now classic talk that Richard Feynman gave on December 29th, 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology. In this lecture, Feynman suggested that there exists no fundamental reason to prevent the controlled manipulation of matter at the scale of individual atoms and molecules. Twenty one years later, Eigler and co-workers [1] constructed the first man-made object atom-by-atom with the aid of a scanning tunneling microscope. This was just 7000 years after Democritus postulated atoms to be the fundamental building blocks of the visible world. A nanometer is thus the space occupied by 3-4 atoms placed end-to-end. Advances in the field have been accelerated following the invention by Binnig and Rohrer in the early 1980s of the scanning tunneling microscope [2]. This microscope, and its derivates, allows us to image and manipulate atoms, molecules and clusters in a controlled manner. It is this tool, which allows us, in a nano-workshop, to create and characterize individual structures whose dimensions are of the order of nanometers. It is forecast that many practical applications of nanotechnology will utilize massive an'ays of such fabrication tools, combined with self-assembly techniques borrowed from nature and the biosciences, to create large numbers of nanoscale objects and structures. As opposed to the microscale, the nanoscale is not just another step towards miniaturization, but is a qualitatively new scale. Here quantum and size phenomena are allowed to manifest themselves either at a purely quantum level or in a certain "admixture" of quantum and classical components. At the foundation of nanosystems lie the quantum manifestations of matter that become relevant and measurable. Consequently, instead of being a limitation or an elusive frontier, quantum phenomena have become the crucial enabling tool for nanotechnology [3].
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