Effects of current day experimental research limitations

(wiki-TODO: discuss this)

High level physical effects that misleadingly may suggest infeasibility:

• High wear in MEMS due to "stiction"
• Focus on the for current day directly applicable material science (alloys)
• Focus on the for material science interesting heavy metallic elements with intersting magnetic properties (f shells) – rare elements ...
• Barely controllable diffusion: on surfaces, in grain boundaries, of dislocations
  Partly due to a focus on metals with exotic properties (lower periodic table) as catalysts where valence electron shells are vast and surface diffusion is fast
  (totally unphysical) visual analogy: Focus on a slippery ice rink rather than a muddy sticky gravel field.
• High difficulty to achieve very high levels of vacuum (UHV at best – nowhere near PPV)
• Immense difficulties with SPM: getting and keeping tips sharp reliably, limits in imageable hight steps, speed limits, ...
• Difficulties in designing artificial proteins for binding (not to speak of catalysis)
• ....

Why is should be feasible despite all that

Low level physical effects (from first principles) that prove feasibility:

• Macroscale style machinery at the nanoscale
• A Minimal Toolset for Positional Diamond Mechanosynthesis (paper)

There is also high level evidence but this is weaker:

• Experimental demonstrations of single atom manipulation
• Progess in de-novo protein design and structural DNA nanotechnology

Both low and high level evidence:

• Why gemstone metamaterial technology should work in brief