analyzing nano-molecules with web browsers
Photo by NoAuthor
Feynman’s Flowers is a citizen cyberscience project developed for PYBOSSA where the researchers invite the volunteers to measure the orientation of a molecule (that look like a flower) on a crystalline metal surface.
The project is studying magnetic molecules to understad how they can be used to make the smallest possible “spintronic” devices, in which charge (electronic) and spin (magnetic) properties can be used together. In the future, this would allow us to make devices that can do more and also use less energy. This is the first project of its kind in this area of physics, applying hte power of crowd-sourcing to help understand images created by a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM).
Feynman’s Flowers is named after the famous scientist Richard Feynman, who in his 1959 talk entitled “There’s plenty of room at the bottom”.