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Richard Feynman’s 1959 lecture “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” envisioned atomic pick and place to build complex nanoscale machines. The lecture is often considered the conceptual birth of nanotechnology.

I am sure this is not the first time conductive AFM has been used to achieve nanoscale patterning to build a useful piece of tech, but very cool nonetheless.

https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf

"Supercurrent" to me implied a diode which could conduct large amps without the normal losses involved from the forward voltage drop; what this is actually referring to is the opposite end of the spectrum, a highly efficient, room temperature single photon emitter, I assume for photonic based computing.

Intertesting. Tantalum is already used in electronics for capacitors (Ta2O5 or something like that).

Only when required, though. It's a conflict resource (which tends to make it more expensive).

Same would apply here, but the paper talks about moving molecules around so maybe quantity would eliminate the issue.

Yeah. $1000+ for a single tantalum hybrid cap [1] is a bit much, but for some applications there’s no real alternative.

[1] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/quantic-evans/TDD...

KTaO3-Based Supercurrent Diode