Inside view

The first useful man-made nanostructure Over his extensive research career, Lord Broers has been involved in many remarkable advances and projects, but one of his greatest research achievements was in the early 1960s during his PhD at the University of Cambridge when he was studying the in-situ ion-etching of surfaces using a scanning electron microscope. He discovered, by accident, that using the SEM to take a picture modified the surface, so he then started to use the machine to write patterns as well. He vividly remembers that fi rst experiment in which he wrote lines on a thin coat of gold on top of a silicon wafer that, when etched by an ion beam, left 70 nm wide gold wires.