Über Paper

Über German "over", "above" or "across"

We have an academic paper coming out. I will pop it at the end, but don't feel obliged to read. Its a bit of a slog, not because its badly written, its just, well, an academic paper. But let me give you the story and maybe you might just care a little more....

What can we do?
Our system is the first of its kind, bringing together implantation with ions and imaging with electrons. We have worked hard with some academics @ Imperial College London who have made some new materials. A small tip is dipped in these new materials and handed over to us. This is where my large machine comes into play. Its called the Platform for Nanoscale Advanced Materials Engineering or PNAME for short.  We place this tip at the top of my column, heat it up a little and then apply a voltage, to help accelerate any atoms that come off the tip. There is a difficultly though, our materials have lots of different types of atoms in it. For example one has gold, silicon and erbium (AuSiEr) in. Therefore, we need to sort through them. We apply a magnetic field in one direction and then an electromagnetic field, that we can change, in the other. If you can remember back to school, this is dictated by Flemmings Left Hand Rule. As the atoms are charged we call them ions, and different elements have different weights, these will be deflected by varying amounts depending on the field. But its not just different elements that have different weights, some atoms of the SAME element have different weights too. These are called isotopes and we can separate them out as well. Step one complete- we have a really pure beam of ions.

Step two is we want to be able to put them down really precisely, sub- 10nm to be exact. How close they are will be important when we try and control how they interact with each other. We do this with a variety of electromagnetic lenses that squeeze and shape the beam down to this point.

And finally step three, we want to be able to tell when one has gone into my material. When our ion smashes into the surface of our sample there is a lot of transferred energy, some of this energy results in electrons being ejected from the surface. We have two detectors that can tell when this happens, and then will tell the system to move to the next point, so we can create arrays of single atoms in a predefined space. 

Why do we care?
Different atoms behave differently. Sounds obvious, but some have particular properties, ones we can control. For example when you stroke a magnet along a nail you can align the dipoles in your nail, and voila you have a magnetic nail. You stroke a piece of paper with your magnet, you're going to be stroking for a long time. One property that atoms have is spin. Spin is the amount of angular momentum an atom has, is up or down and different isotopes have varying amounts, why our step one of sorting our beam is so important. Some have a useful spin, like the nail, and others not, like the paper. Now we can select atoms that have a spin that we want, for us its a non-zero spin. This is because if you have a non-zero spin you can also apply a stimulus to these atoms when they are in the new material and control which spin state they are in, up or down. This up and down can be used as a switch, and being that computers are basically made up of switches we now have a computing system made up of atoms as switches. These are called qubits.
 
Finally because we can put them in an exact array we can control how much they interact with one another, in a quantum way. This is the beginnings of a quantum computer, it adds more complexity then just using them as an individual switch as they all interact. I wont go into quantum computing too much here, but there are some great resources out there if you want to know more, and will try and post about it at a later date. But overall the next generation of computers whose power of simulation out strip current classical computers hugely, and will enable great advances especially in life sciences for example when you want to model how a protein folds for drug discovery, as current computers just cant handle this. 
 
Writing the paper

Now you would think that having all this data, the words and paper itself would just fall into place, alas that did not happen. It was about 9 months of tough work to get it to be publishable. In those 9 months very little actual lab work is done, its all background checks and formatting. And it wasn't even done by me, Mason did a great job, perfected every figure and made his case to every reviewer. So now we are here- for you all to read (or not).

I wish we actually had come up with a LOTR reference, one paper to rule them all type thing, but we went Über pretty early on and it stuck. Its the paper to hold all our references for all later publications, it holds all our materials we have looked at to date and the simulations we have compared against. It will be my reference as to what our resolving power is, and what are the closest comparisons. If academics ask what can our system do I will direct them to this, it really is One paper to rule them all, one paper to find them, One paper to bring them all, and in the Advanced Engineering Materials bind them (forgive my artistic licence).

And if you really do want to give it a read it is available here;

A High-Resolution Versatile Focused Ion Implantation Platform for Nanoscale Engineering

https://doi.org/10.1002/adem.202300889

5 min read