AVS 45th International Symposium
    Nanometer-scale Science and Technology Division Thursday Sessions
       Session NS-ThP

Paper NS-ThP25
Designing New Materials at the Molecular Scale - An Example in Etching and Deposition

Thursday, November 5, 1998, 5:30 pm, Room Hall A

Session: Nanometer-Scale Science and Technology Division Poster Session
Presenter: E.A. Rietman, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies
Authors: J.A. Gurney, McGill University, Canada
E.A. Rietman, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies
M.A. Marcus, KLA Instruments
M.P. Andrews, McGill University, Canada
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We desire the ability to design molecular-scale components and new materials using a heuristic programming technique such as genetic algorithms. To this end we have been investigating the possibility of designing new materials in the space of cellular automata. Molecules interact, more or less, only with their nearest neighbors. This suggests that cellular automata (arrays of nearest neighbor interacting finite state machines) may be used for modeling the dynamics of molecules. Since it is well known that structures can be "grown" in the space of the cellular automata (CA) we conjecture that by manipulation of the rule table or rule vector describing the CA dynamics we can evolve desired structures in the CA space. To support this supposition we present work on modeling the etching and deposition (dissolution and growth) of crystals. We empirically find a mapping between the automaton rule table and the surface physics of the crystal. @FootnoteText@ @footnote 1@ J.A. Gurney, E.A. Rietman, M.A. Marcus, and M.P. Andrews, "Mapping the Rule Table of a 2-D Probabilistic Cellular Automaton to the Chemical Physics of Etching and Deposition", Submitted, 1998