Electrons on surfaces behave like waves that can be confined by atomic structures

Evidence

In the early 1990s, physicist Don Eigler and his group at IBM in Amaden, California, managed to pick up and move individual atoms around at will. They used a tiny, extremely sharp needle (only one atom wide at the bottom), moving it precisely by attaching it to crystals that change slightly in size in response to electric fields. Electrical current passing through empty space between the needle and the surface rises and falls depending on what is near the tip of the needle. Using the electrical current as their “eyes,” they could “see” and even pick up iron atoms one at a time on a copper surface. They built walls from a row of atoms and then tiny closed-wall “corrals” only a few tens of atoms across. They hoped to corral (confine) electrons that were known to be skittering around on the surface of the copper samples, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 897

Categorization

• XREF: Directly analogous to the scanning tunneling microscope work that won Eigler fame and connects to wavefront physics theme across the book, like the ripple tank and acoustic room analogies.
• CANDY: A classic cocktail-party science fact: scientists literally dragged single atoms around and built tiny electron corrals with a needle.