Atomic engineering

The term "Atomic engineering" appears to be first coined by Theodore von Kármán,^[1] where he wrote

"And now it seems we are at the threshold of the new atomic age. I do not know whether or not this is true, but certainly we shall have "atomic engineering" in the fields of power and transportation. Are we prepared for the problems involved?"

So atomic power (and what may generally be considered to be in the discipline of nuclear engineering today) are examples of what he had in mind, but perhaps not exclusively. Atomic clock, potential applications of ultracold atom, etc., for instance, should reasonably belong to "Atomic engineering". Atomic engineering may need to be a superset of nuclear engineering, due to historical usage of terms like Atoms for Peace, International Atomic Energy Agency, atomic engineer, etc.

An inclusive definition could be "exploiting the atomic characters of matter for engineering applications". The atomic character could be the atomic spin (e.g. in Nuclear magnetic resonance and quantum computing applications), atomic position (e.g. Optical lattice), atomic mass (e.g. atomic power), etc.

Richard Feynman, in his famous 1959 lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" on the trend of miniaturization, envisioned^[2]

"But I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately – in the great future – we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down! What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them

...

When we get to the very, very small world – say circuits of seven atoms – we have a lot of new things that would happen that represent completely new opportunities for design. Atoms on a small scale behave like nothing on a large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics. So, as we go down and fiddle around with the atoms down there, we are working with different laws, and we can expect to do different things. We can manufacture in different ways. We can use, not just circuits, but some system involving the quantized energy levels, or the interactions of quantized spins, etc."

Most practices of nanotechnology and materials science today have foci distinct from Feynman's ultimate vision of manipulating individual atomic position and spin, which may be better described by "Atomic engineering", that addresses characteristic length scales from 1 femtometer (the atomic nucleus size) to 1 nanometer (about 5 atoms across in linear dimension). Coherent quantum control of individual atomic defect like the Nitrogen-vacancy center, and the eventual "3D atom printing" ("2D atom printing" was realized in 1990 by IBM^[3] using scanning tunnelling microscope), fit Feynman's ultimate vision.

References

1. Theodore von Kármán, "Atomic Engineering?", Journal of Applied Physics 17 (1946) 2-3.
2. Richard P. Feynman, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", Caltech Engineering and Science 23 (5), 22 (1960).
3. D. M. EIGLER and E. K. SCHWEIZER, "Positioning single atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope", Nature 344 (1990) 524-526.