cfaed Seminar Series

After Blaise Pascal's calculus clocks, lamps calculators, computers lithographed on the surface of a silicon crystal, what about integrating all or part of an electronic calculator in a single molecule? Even the mechanical machines may be one day miniaturized down to the end of the material world, molecule by molecule. We will show how the idea of molecular electronics continued for over 40 years and, boosted in 1987 by the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981, has introduced a plethora of questions such as: Are there enough resources in a single molecule to make a machine? Can Physics provide enough technological paths for exchanging energy and information with one and always the same molecule deposited on a surface? Does synthetic Chemistry allow for enlarging enough a molecule so that it becomes a machine however not reaching the size of a protein by elementary function? Much closer to us, would you like to attend in 2015 the first international molecule-car race?