On our screens we see images at higher and higher definition, instead IBM created a little movie titled “A Boy and His Atom” using a sort of stop motion animation to create nearly 250 images by placing thousands of individual atoms.
In this film, a character named Atom befriends with a single atom and plays with it. To make those images it was necessary to place the atoms using a scanning tunneling microscope, an extremely sophisticated instrument developed at IBM that earned its inventors Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer the Nobel Prize for physics.
This scanning tunneling microscope weighs two tons and operates at a temperature of -268 degrees Celsius, which means close to absolute zero, and magnifies the surface of the atoms over a hundred million times. This instrument also allows to manipulate atoms and to control temperature, pressure and vibration with great precision.
A kind of extremely sharp needle is moved on a copper surface to manipulate the atoms. The needle is held at a distance of one nanometer from the surface to attract atoms and molecules moving them with extreme precision. With this technique they have created the 242 frames that make up the movie “A Boy and His Atom”.
This achievement hasn’t been obtain just for fun but it’s a demonstration of the technologies that IBM is experimenting to create smaller and smaller memories. Traditional technologies used for the storage of data are reaching their limits, therefore, it’s necessary to invent new ones. Nanotechnology is the future in many fields and this is one of the cases where IBM is leading the way.
Today it takes about a million atoms to store a bit of data, if it were possible to use a single atom to store one bit, data density would be a million times higher. Obviously, it’s unthinkable to have a two-ton device refrigerated at very low temperatures to store our data but we’re talking about a technology which currently is experimental to say the least.
Let’s remember that the first har disks were huge and extremely expensive for a capacity of just a few megabytes. It’s clear that it will take who knows how many years before we can have at home “atomic” mass storage, probably used by quantum computers, but in the world of computer science today’s science fiction is truly the tomorrow’s normality.
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