ERC grant awarded to molecular manipulation projectJülich, 5 September – The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded funding in the form of Starting Grants to Dr. Christian Wagner. The early-career scientist will each receive up to € 1.5 million in funding over the next five years to conduct fundamental research in the field of "controlled mechanical manipulation of molecules" and set up his own research group.Abstract of the proposal: The idea to freely control the atomic-scale structure of matter has intrigued scientists for many decades. The low-temperature scanning probe microscope (LT SPM) has become the instrument of choice for this task since it allows the rearrangement of atoms and molecules on a surface. There is, however, no generic SPM-based method for the manipulation of molecules beyond lateral rearrangement. The goal of this project is to develop controlled mechanical manipulation of molecules (CM3) in which a LT SPM is used to handle large organic molecules in three dimensions with optimal control over position, orientation and shape. CM3 will become a game-changing technique for research on molecular properties and molecular-scale engineering, because it combines fully deterministic manipulation with broad access to molecular degrees of freedom for the first time. In CM3 the tip is attached to a single reactive atom within a molecule. Tip displacement guides the molecule into a desired conformation while the surface provides a second (weaker) fixation. The fundamental challenge addressed by this project is the identification of precise molecular conformations at any time during manipulation. The solution is a big data approach where large batches of automatically recorded SPM manipulation data are structured using machine learning and interpreted by comparison to atomistic simulations. The key idea is a comparison of entire conformation spaces at once, which is robust, even if the theory is not fully quantitative. The obtained map of the conformation space is used to determine molecular conformations during manipulation by methods of control theory. The effectiveness of this approach will be demonstrated in experiments that unambiguously reveal the structure-conductance relation for a series of molecules and that realize the engineering paradigm of piecewise assembly on the molecular scale by constructing a direct current rotor / motor from individual components. |
▶January 19th, 2023 MomaLab is part of the Orbital Cinema project!▶September 8th, 2022 Warmest congratulations to Taner Esat for winning the Gerhard Ertl Young Investigator Award for his outstanding work in surface science, particularly metastable standing molecules.▶April 7th, 2022 Want to make your own standing molecule? "Design Principles for Metastable Standing Molecules" Read at J. Phys. Chem. C▶October 10th, 2021 We finally knocked it down: "The stabilization potential of a standing molecule" Read at Science Advances Press release▶October 22nd, 2020 Introducing machine learning to the nanoscale: "Autonomous robotic nanofabrication with reinforcement learning" Read at Science Advances Press release▶July 2020 Our Helmholtz-AI project MomoNano (together with HZB and TU-Berlin) successfully competed for a three year funding by the Helmholtz Association.▶September 2nd, 2020 "The theory of scanning quantum dot microscopy" Read at J Phys. Cond. Mat. |