[1] During his retirement, he was asked to join the Avogadro project to craft a silicon sphere with high smoothness.

[3] In addition to precision instruments, Leistner uses his hands to feel for irregularities in the roundness of the sphere.

[1] The research team has called his extraordinary sense of touch "atomic feeling".

If it were scaled to the size of the Earth, it would have a high point of only 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in) above "sea level".

By refining the Teflon lap polishing technique and performing research into the mechanism of optical polishing, he has improved the quality and precision of superpolished optical surfaces, pushing the accuracy of shapes and surface roughness down to nearly atomic dimensions.