Proceedings

EPJ AP Highlight - Training for the first international nano-car race

A 3 step driving along the Au(111) track. The black cross indicates the tip position for the inelastic tunneling excitation of the Dresden molecule-vehicle.

The first international nano-car race will be held in Toulouse, France, during spring 2017, with the participation of six international teams. The training session of the Dresden Team is reported here.

To prepare their participation, Eisenhut et al. exercised on the Toulouse LT-UHV 4-STM reconfigured for the race with 4 independent controllers (one per scanning tunneling microscope (STM)). Their findings are reported in EPJ AP.

An Au(111) surface was prepared over a full gold substrate. A 90 nm long race track with two turns was selected on this surface according to the following rules

The Dresden windmill molecule-vehicles were deposited in ultrahigh vacuum conditions, imaged, and manipulated by any one of the 4 tips on the race track, reaching a 5nm/hour driving speed, including the STM image recording after each driving bias voltage pulse. Strategies for a safe and fast driving were established by the Dresden team along the Au(111) surface fcc rafter together with the possibility to repair crashed molecules, for example during the negotiation of a turn.

The teams registered for the nano-car race will benefit from this atomic-scale, single-molecule-vehicle driving experience to improve their own driving strategy.

This was our first experience of publishing with EPJ Web of Conferences. We contacted the publisher in the middle of September, just one month prior to the Conference, but everything went through smoothly. We have had published MNPS Proceedings with different publishers in the past, and would like to tell that the EPJ Web of Conferences team was probably the best, very quick, helpful and interactive. Typically, we were getting responses from EPJ Web of Conferences team within less than an hour and have had help at every production stage.
We are very thankful to Solange Guenot, Web of Conferences Publishing Editor, and Isabelle Houlbert, Web of Conferences Production Editor, for their support. These ladies are top-level professionals, who made a great contribution to the success of this issue. We are fully satisfied with the publication of the Conference Proceedings and are looking forward to further cooperation. The publication was very fast, easy and of high quality. My colleagues and I strongly recommend EPJ Web of Conferences to anyone, who is interested in quick high-quality publication of conference proceedings.

On behalf of the Organizing and Program Committees and Editorial Team of MNPS-2019, Dr. Alexey B. Nadykto, Moscow State Technological University “STANKIN”, Moscow, Russia. EPJ Web of Conferences vol. 224 (2019)

ISSN: 2100-014X (Electronic Edition)

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