Saw-Wai Hla recently garnered worldwide publicity for uncovering a technique that enables scientists to study chemical reactions molecule by molecule.

Ultimate Reactions

Former ICTP Diploma student Saw-Wai Hla, currently a researcher at the Free University in Berlin, Germany, is an accomplished young scientist whose pathbreaking work with scanning tunnelling microscopes has been discussed in virtually every major scientific publication. He is also an accomplished musician who once earned a living playing bass guitar in a 'boy band' that produced three albums and made a dozen appearances on national television in his native country of Myanmar (formerly Burma) in southeast Asia.
Hla fervently believes that the talents and skills accounting for his success as a musician are the same ones that he has put to good use in his scientific endeavours.
"In science as in music," Hla explains, "it's not enough to master the techniques. You must know how to handle the instruments. You must also have an emotional attachment to your work."
"In music that means not just having the ability to play the correct notes and chords but the feeling to play those notes and chords in ways that touch and move your audience. In science that means not just having the ability to master your laboratory instruments but having an innate feeling of how to take your research in uncharted directions."
Hla describes how this feeling helped him take the well-known analytical power of scanning tunnelling microscopes to new heights by using the tip of the microscope to 'tease' single molecules through a complicated chemical process known as the Ullman reaction.
The Ullman reaction, which has been part of the tool kit of chemical laboratories for more than a century, creates multi-ring polymers by blending countless reacting molecules in large copper-laced vessels that provide the catalyst for the reaction. Hla and his colleagues at the Free University in Berlin miniaturised the process by using electron flows from the tip of the microscope to break and then rejoin molecules one at a time. A process, previously characterised by a blur of chemical activity, was reduced to a step-by-step procedure that allows scientists to visualise the reaction as it's unfolding.
This breakthrough, which could effectively allow scientists to probe the most intimate details of chemical reactions molecule by molecule, also opens up the possibility of building human-made molecules in the future. "We are not there yet," says Hla, "but the discovery certainly makes a monomolecular construction process a possibility." If such a bottom-up molecular construction technique becomes a reality, it could have an enormous impact on atomic-scale chemistry and nanoscience and nanotechnology.
Chemical and Engineering News, the flagship publication of the American Chemical Society, billed Hla's "atom by atom reaction" as the 'top story' of the week in its 2 November 2000 edition, and this past fall Nature, Science, Scientific American, Science News, Physics Today and Physics News all gave extensive coverage to his work.
The press attention generated numerous requests for lectures by Hla, including presentations at international conferences in Canada, China, France and Sweden, and invited seminars at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center and Clemson University in the United States, and the University of Freiburg in Germany. It also brought Hla back to Trieste to speak at the Workshop on Nanoscale Spectroscopy hosted by ICTP last December.
"I was delighted to return to Trieste," says Hla. That's where he had spent much of his time during the 1990s--first, from 1992-1993, as a student concentrating on condensed matter physics in ICTP's Diploma Course (where he completed his thesis under the direction of Maria Peressi, professor at the University of Trieste's Department of Theoretical Physics); then from 1994-1997 as a doctoral student at the J. Stefan Institute (IJS) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in a programme sponsored jointly by ICTP and IJS (where he earned a doctorate under Velibor Marinkovic and Albert Prodan, focussing his research on experimental surface science and thin film physics); and finally, from 1997-1998, as a fellow in ICTP's Training and Research in Italian Laboratories (TRIL) programme, working at the TASC laboratory at the Elettra synchrotron light facility in Area Science Park, Trieste, on experiments related to surface science.
"I owe my success," Hla notes, "largely to the education and training I received in Trieste. My experience there allowed me the opportunity to hone my skills both in theory and experimentation. I hope to put this background to use again in moving my research from the realm of laboratory observations (the ability to use the scanning tunnelling microscope to see the most intimate details of chemical reactions) to the world of molecular manipulation and creation, which could spur the creation of novel chemical compounds that cannot be made through conventional means."
"I consider myself an alumnus of ICTP and, more generally, of the Trieste scientific community. There's no doubt that ICTP and the intricate network of scientific institutions in Trieste and the surrounding area are largely responsible for whatever success I have achieved to date and whatever success I might achieve in the future."

Back to Contents Forward to Monitor

Home