Christian Joachim Director of Research, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)

Dr Christian Joachim is First Class Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), head of the molecular Nanoscience and Picotechnology group (The GNS) in CEMES/CNRS, Toulouse France (www.cemes.fr/GNS/) and A*STAR VIP “Atom based technology”in Singapore, attached to IMRE. He is Adjunct Professor at Sup'Aero (France) teaching History of Science and Quantum Ressources.

He coordinated the EU-sponsored project entitled, "Bottom-up Nanomachines" and the French Midi-Pyrenees research effort in "Nanoscience, Nanotechnology and Nanomaterial (CPER 3N)". He is currently in charge of the EU Integrated Project, “Pico-Inside” (www.picoinside.org). He directed two North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Advance Research Workshops on Nanoscale Sciences in the early 1990’s.

Dr Joachim was the first to demonstrate the non-exponential behaviour of electron transfer through a molecule. When he was at IBM in the mid 80’s, he pioneered experimental research on electrical contact on a single molecule using the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM). He did STM work ranging from molecular switching in 1987 to the C60 molecule.

He introduced the Elastic Scattering Quantum Chemistry (ESQC) technique in 1991, now a standard in STM image calculations. His recent accomplishments include:
• Theory of atomic and molecular manipulation with the STM
• Discovery of long range tunnel processes through a molecule
• Invention of a single molecule amplifier in 1997, discovery of the first molecular rotor in 1998, of the molecular Hoover in 2005.
• Invention of the molecular wheelbarrow in 2001
• Invention of the first intramolecular logic gate in 2005.
• Invention of the first molecular rack and pinion mechanical device in 2006.

More recently, he introduced the concept of mono-molecular electronics (both semi-classical and quantum) to embody a logic gate inside a single molecule and of tunnel wired molecular nano-robots like the first uni-molecular “wheelbarrow”, 1.6 nm in dimension. He is now developing the atomic scale technology for interconnecting a single molecule to multiple atomic scale electrodes, with a degree of precision better than 0.05 nm.

He is the author of more than 200 scientific publications and has presented more than 200 invited talks on electron transfer theory through a molecule, STM and Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) image calculations, tunnel transport through a molecule, molecular devices, nanolithography and uni-molecular nanoscale machines.