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The first nanocar race

Nature Reviews Materials volume 2, Article number: 17040 (2017) Cite this article

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The first race involving molecular ‘cars’ stimulated technical advances in scanning tunnelling microscopy and provided insights in surface science and synthetic chemistry — it also attracted wide interest from the public.

Four years ago, we proposed a nanocar race; that is, a race involving several molecular ‘vehicles’ individually driven at the same time and on the same surface by different ‘pilots’ using scanning tunnelling microscopes (STMs)1. With this announcement, we set a challenge of designing and synthesizing robust single-molecule machines that can be controlled on a surface. We expected the race to stimulate developments in STM technology, atomic-scale surface preparation and evaporation of molecules, which in the future will enable the individual control of molecules that are able to, for example, move, perform mechanical work or carry out calculations. After almost 25 years of STM experiments, testing the mechanical and electronic properties of single molecules, it was also important to present to a wide audience the efforts of STM labs around the world in realizing working machineries with a minimum number of atoms, delivering a vision of the possibility to build and/or deconstruct nanomaterials and miniature machines atom by atom.

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Figure 1: Summary of the race results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Toulouse, UPS, 118 route de Narbonne, Toulouse, 31062, France

    Gwénaël Rapenne

  2. CEMES-CNRS, 29 rue Jeanne Marvig, Toulouse, 31055, France

    Gwénaël Rapenne & Christian Joachim

  3. MANA, National Institute for Materials Science, 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, 305-0044, Ibaraki, Japan

    Christian Joachim

Authors
  1. Gwénaël Rapenne
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  2. Christian Joachim
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Correspondence to Christian Joachim.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Rapenne, G., Joachim, C. The first nanocar race. Nat Rev Mater 2, 17040 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/natrevmats.2017.40

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