Scanning tunneling microscopy single atom/molecule manipulation and its application to nanoscience and technology

Saw-Wai Hla, "Scanning tunneling microscopy single atom/molecule manipulation and its application to nanoscience and technology"
J. Vacuum Sci. Tech B 23, 1351 (2005)

A nice introduction to the field.

Personally, I find this type of single-molecule chemistry-by-STM to be amazingly fascinating stuff. I really wanted to do something like this as a postdoc, so I read a lot of papers, etc. Some particularly cool work was done by Sylvain Martel (Montreal Polytechnic) and Ian Hunter (MIT), published in the Journal of Micromechatronics (the reference is in my lab notebook, but it was 2004, IIRC) in which they designed sugar-cube sized robots, each capable of moving around on a surface, and alternately carrying STM or AFM devices, as well as optical allignment sensors, etc. Unfortunately, Hunter didn't have any room in his lab when I applied (or at least that was his white-lie), and I never got a response from Martel (who probably looked at my laughable theoretician CV and deleted the email at once). Hla, who previously was affiliated (or at least wrote some papers) with Karlheinz Rieder, at the Free University of Berlin, did some of the pioneering work, doing classical "organic chemistry" stuff like making iodobenzene by dissociating iodine, and dragging it onto benzene(!) (this was in a PRL back in 2000, IIRC), etc. But, I can barely speak English (as you, my dedicated readers, might be able to tell), so the thought of learning German was out. And I really liked staying in the Bay Area.

So if any of you reading this is looking for a postdoc to do this type of stuff...even for a few months...