ABSTRACT
Early in the nineteenth century, scientific evidence was found that proved that matter is composed of discrete entities called atoms. It is likely that this discovery prompted a natural desire to be able to control the structure of matter atom by atom. Feynman [1] in his 1960 article 'There's plenty of room at the bottom' discussed the advantages that could be provided by such control. For example, he pointed out that if a bit of information requires only 100 atoms, then all the books ever written could be stored in a cube with sides 0.02 in long. In recent years, researchers have been able to write bits of information in two dimensions using even fewer than 100 atoms by using a scanning tunneling microscope [2]. Economical fabrication of such structures remains a challenge [ 1-4]. Storage of information on an ever finer scale is just one aspect of the rapidly growing field of nanomaterials in which researchers are trying to control the fine-scale structure of materials.
