Biography
Don Eigler is a physicist and IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center. On September 28, 1989 he achieved a landmark in humankind's ability to build small structures by demonstrating the ability to manipulate individual atoms with atomic-scale precision. He went on to write I-B-M using 35 individual Xenon atoms; this event was likened to the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk by Jack Uldrich in his book, The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change The Future of Your Business. Eigler's feat was performed using a low temperature ultra high vacuum scanning tunneling microscope that he designed and built.
Since then, his group's results include the invention of quantum corrals,discovery of the quantum mirage effect, demonstration of a fundamentally new way to transport information through a solid utilizing modulated quantum states, the demonstration of nanometer-scale logic circuits based on molecular cascades, and invention of spin excitation spectroscopy. Most recently, milestones made by the researchers in Eigler's historic lab include the ability to measure the magnetic properties of individual atoms and the ability to measure the force it takes to move individual atoms.
In addition to his professional pursuits, Eigler has been building his skills as a trainer of service dogs, specializing in dogs that assist the mobility impaired. The IBM Corporation, sensitive to the needs of employees, has graciously allowed him to utilize the Almaden Research Center as a real-world training ground for his dogs, Argon and Neon. His dogs-in-training are a regular sight at Almaden; because one or both of them is nearly always with him, they have been included in New York Timesand San Francisco Chronicle feature stories on IBM Research.
Eigler received both his bachelor's and doctorate degrees from the University of California San Diego and was named its Outstanding Alumnus of the year in 1999. He has been recognized for his accomplishments with the Davisson-Germer Prize awarded by the American Physical Society, the Dannie Heineman Prize awarded by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Grand Award for Science and Technology awarded by Popular Science Magazine, and numerous honorary lectureships including the Gordon Research Conference's Alexander M. Cruikshank Lectureship in Physical Sciences, the Bethe Lectureship at Cornell University, the Loeb Lectureship at Harvard University, the Bragg Lectureship at University College London and a Regents Lectureship at the University of California Los Angeles. In 2002 he received an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Delft. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2004 he was elected a member of the Max Planck Society, Germany's most prestigious scientific organization. In 2007 he was appointed a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He was named an IBM Fellow in 1993, the highest technical honor in the IBM Corporation.
Eigler currently serves on the advisory boards of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Nanoelectronics Program, the Oak Ridge National Laboratories Center for Nanophase Materials Science (CNMS), New Zealand's MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, the University of California Microelectronics Innovation and Computer Research Opportunities (MICRO) program, the Harvard University Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC), and the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Nanoscale Science program.