project name: Electron Controlled Chemical Lithography
initiating country: The European Union
programme area: ESF – European Science Foundation contract type: ESF COST
contract/proposal/call number: 601
status: active
Fields of Research:
Chemical Engineering Design
keywords: electron-controlled chemical lithography
Note that the follow people may not represent the full extent of the consortium. FEAST has tried to identify the Australian participants, and their collaborators (or coordinator), within the project. Also note that Australian participation may not necessarily be on a formal level.
| name | organisation | state or country |
|---|---|---|
| Flinders University | SA, Australia |
summary:
The ability to understand, manipulate and control chemical reactions at the molecular level is one of the great challenges of modern research. Since chemical processes are dominant in most areas of science and technology, the ability to control their pathways provides exciting new opportunities that may be exploited by both the research and technological communities. Such ‘single molecule engineering’ requires selective bond cleavage in target molecules to allow subsequent management of the local site chemistry. In electron beam experiments it is well established that low energy electrons offer this selectivity with high efficiency, a selectivity that is controllable by simply ‘tuning’ the electron energy. Recently, low energy electrons derived from the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope have also been used to control bond rupture and subsequent linkage of individual molecules to the substrate. This Action aims at an interdisciplinary European programme to combine state-of-the-art in electron induced chemistry and surface science with these recent advances in scanning tunnel microscopy to pioneer a new field of ‘Electron Controlled Chemical Lithography’, with the prospect of designer synthesis down to the nanoscale and electron controlled manipulation of surface properties with spatial resolution ranging from the millimetre down to the nanometre scale.