Don Eigler

Donald Mark Eigler (March 23, 1953) is an American physicist associated with nanotechnology at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He is considered an eminent nanotechnologist.

Work In 1989, Eigler was the first to use a scanning tunneling microscope tip to arrange individual atoms on a surface, spelling out the letters "IBM" with 35 xenon atoms. He later went on to create the first quantum corrals, which are well-defined quantum wave patterns of small numbers of atoms, and nanoscale logic circuits using individual molecules of carbon monoxide. He shared the 2010 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience with Nadrian Seeman for these breakthroughs.

Eigler graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a bachelor's degree in 1975 and a doctoral degree in 1984. He was postdoctoral staff at AT&T Bell Labs for two years, and then moved to IBM where he was appointed IBM Fellow in 1993. He retired from IBM in 2011.

He was elected in 1995 a Fellow of the American Physical Society and in 1999 a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.