Stiffness

 the less soft the nanomachinery the less imprecise the mechanosynthesis

Gradually introducing sufficient stiffness into atomically precise structures is of key importance for bootstrapping the far term goal of advanced nanofactories through a series of earlier increasingly more powerful atomically precise productive nanosystems.

Sufficient stiffness is:

• necessary for sufficient suppression of thermal vibration amplitudes.
  First sufficiently below the size of pre-produced atomically precise blocks and self-alignment/self-centering slots.
  Later sufficiently below atom to atom distance to exponentially suppress misplacement errors.
• necessary to archive atomic resolution not just atomic precision
• necessary for making force applying mechanosynthesis possible
• one reason for the choice of diamondoid compounds as good base material / far term target material

Sufficient lattice scaled stiffness for early low stiffness systems

Usage of self assembled atomically precise base parts (aka "vitamins") allow for less stringent conditions on stiffness. Only the lattice scaled stiffness must be sufficient for block based self centering assembly (which is not really callable "mechanosynthesis" yet).

(TODO: Add external link to lattice scaled stiffness explanation page.)

How stiffness scales with size

The scaling law for stiffness is such that smaller structures have lower stiffness ("softer"). (TODO: Add math and graph.) Nanoscale diamond e.g. has a compliance that when interpreted at the macroscale lies in a very intuitively understandable range.

Influence on manipulator design

The choice of geometric design of nano-manipulators must be taken such that the compliance of the material is compensated for. Long skinny serial mechanics robotic arms (like many industry robots on the macroscale) are a bad choice for the deep nanoscale. Bulky parallel mechanic manipulators are a good choice.

General

The SI unit of stiffness is newtons per square meter (N/m²)
The inverse of stiffness is called compliance. Not softness which would be the inverse of hardness.

External links

• Nanostructures, Nanomaterials, and Lattice-Scaled Stiffness (2009-02-15 on K. Eric Drexlers metamodern website) (Note: current version has broken further reaching links. Todo: add link to waybackmachine version)