In recent decades, researchers have been able to produce structures from single atoms. One of the first examples was presented by D. M. Eigler and E. K. Schweizer in 1990 in Nature, a tiny IBM logo formed from just a few xenon atoms produced with a scanning probe microscope. But even today, almost 30 years later, we are still a long way from fabricating nanostructures directly from complex molecules. Although molecules are much bigger than atoms, they are much more difficult to control. “With atoms, the orientation is not important. But molecules have a specific shape. For example, the orientation in which they adhere to a surface or to the tip of the microscope is important,” says Prof. Stefan Tautz, institute head at Forschungszentrum Jülich.