Solid-state SiO₂ nano-gears AFM tip manipulation on HOPG

Abstract

On a native graphite surface, 15 nm-thick solid-state nanogears are nanofabricated with a 30 nm outer diameter and six teeth. The nanogears are manipulated one at a time by the tip of an atomic force microscope using the sample stage displacements for the manipulation and recording of the corresponding manipulation signals. For step heights below 3.0 nm, nanogears are manipulated up and down native graphite surface step edges. In the absence of a central shaft per nanogear, gearing between nanogears is limited to a few 1/12 turns for six teeth. When the graphite step is higher than 3 nm, a rack-and-pinion mechanism was constructed along the edge with a 90 nm nanogear pinion.

Train of Single Molecule-Gears

“…1 This was recently pushed forwards down to the mesoscale with the nanofabrication of solid state nano-gears having a 30 nm diameter and using the nanolithography resist itself for the gear material. 2 The demonstration that a designed molecule can do more than a random rotation on a surface 3 was accompanied by the study of a series of single molecule mechanical machinery like the non-reversible CO Domino effect molecular cascade, 4 the molecular rack and pinion, 5 the molecule wheelbarrow, 6 the switchable moleculemotors 7 and molecule-vehicles [8][9][10] able to function alone on a surface and not in average among billion and in solution. 11 The stabilization of a stable atomic scale rotation axle is the bottleneck for constructing single molecule rotating machinery.…”

Effect of lubricants on the rotational transmission between solid-state gears

“…The development of the atomic force microscope (AFM) [ 19 ] and the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) [ 20 – 21 ] has allowed for visualization and manipulation of nanoscale gears [ 22 ]. Those gears can be either solid-state gears or molecular gears, which are created by top-down approaches (e.g., using focused ion beams [ 23 ] or electron beams [ 24 – 25 ] to etch the substrate) or bottom-up approaches such as chemical synthesis [ 26 – 27 ]. The ultimate goal for those miniaturized gears is to implement nanoscale mechanical systems such as nanorobots [ 28 ] or mechanical calculators such as the Pascaline [ 29 ].…”

Molecular Gears: From Solution to Surfaces

“…Since ancient Greek times, numerous systems of increasing complexity have been engineered, exploiting gears as key elementary mechanical units. The size of cogwheels could gradually be reduced over the centuries as a consequence of technological progress, and miniaturization could be pursued down to the nanometer scale by using e‐beam lithography to produce the smallest solid‐state cogwheels reported to date, with a diameter of 70 nm [18] . However, this top‐down strategy aiming at an ultimate miniaturization of cogwheels is now reaching its physical limits.…”

“…The size of cogwheels could gradually be reduced over the centuries as a consequence of technological progress, and miniaturization could be pursued down to the nanometer scale by using e-beam lithography to produce the smallest solid-state cogwheels reported to date, with a diameter of 70 nm. [18] However, this top-down strategy aiming at an ultimate miniaturization of cogwheels is now reaching its physical limits. As an alternative, technomimetic bottom-up approaches have been devised during the past 40 years to design and synthesize cogwheels at the molecular scale, and subsequently assemble them in a controlled manner into functional gearing systems.…”