Building electronics at the nanoscale to watch nature at the nanoscale

Major technological breakthroughs in the last two decades have pushed the detection limits of microscopic techniques towards the dreams of many scientists: detection, manipulation and control of matter on the atomic and molecular scale. The application of these techniques to study the action of individual biomolecules has provided us with previously unknown details about how proteins fold and unfold, bind and unbind, and perform conformational changes to enable catalytic reactions. To date, single molecule studies either rely on force based detection using atomic force microscopes and optical tweezers or on purely optical detection principles such as fluorescence. In this talk, I discuss progress towards establishing a third, fundamentally new, detection technology: electronic detection using carbon nanotube based field-effect transistors. Our results include the fabrication of atomic sized sensors, electronic detection of individual chemical reactions, and new understanding of fundamental signal-to-noise limitations.