The nanoManipulator was used to push a 30nm-diameter multiwalled carbon nanotube up onto two other tubes to create a bridge structure on the mica substrate. Force feedback was used to position the tip exactly between the two lower tubes in order to peel them apart once the third tube was on top of them. This shows a sequence of pushes that moved a colloidal gold particle across a micron-sized field and into a gap etched in a gold wire. Force feedback during the push events made it possible to move the ball without destroying it and to avoid patches of contaminant on the surface. The ball starts in the circled position on the upper left images.
Yellow lines trace the path of the ball, showing where high force was used to push it.
The particle ends up in the gap in the lower-right image. Taking the two ends of the wire out to external contacts will allow us to measure the energy states of the particle. A preliminary experiment is shown here, where the particles have been moved on a mica substrate. Once the impedance was infinite, the removed wire was pushed back into the gap to tune the impedance from about 100 to about 1K Ohms. White contour lines indicate constant-height curves on the wire.