Using over 100,000 CPU hours, a Zyvex/IMM/Georgia Tech team including the familiar-to-Nanodot names of Robert Freitas, Ralph Merkle, Jim Von Ehr, and John Randall — along with soon-to-be-familiar co-authors Jingping Peng and George Skidmore — have modeled the mechanosynthesis of diamond onto a 200-atom surface. Published in the Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience (1 MB pdf, Feb. 2006), the work shows that the Germanium version of the most-studied tooltip successfully places a C2 carbon dimer on a diamond surface at both 300K (room temperature) and 80K (liquid nitrogen temperature).
This tooltip, initially described at a Foresight Conference in 2002, was the first complete tooltip ever proposed for diamond mechanosynthesis and remains the only tooltip motif that has been successfully simulated for its intended function on a full 200-atom diamond surface. Congrats to all involved! —Christine
