Excerpts from netnews.sci.nanotech: 22-Dec-94 Re: Most basic tool by
Derrick C. Mancini@pslu1
> Also, electrostatic combs currently used in much micromachining
> technology have been used successfully for tweezers. Also, bi-
> morphic elements, sensitive to thermal changes, have been successfully
> use this way. The scale is still a bit large, but they hope to get
> down to handling large molecules eventually.
This just reminded me of some research I heard of going on at Princeton for something called 'optical tweezers' (by Steven Block, I believe). The general idea was that a low power laser beam could be used to drag molecules around. I don't know what scale this was working on, but if anyone is interested I can try to dig up some more detailed references.
Gerry