IBM in atoms was a demonstration by
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
scientists in 1989 of a technology capable of manipulating individual
atom
Atoms are the basic particles of the chemical elements. An atom consists of a atomic nucleus, nucleus of protons and generally neutrons, surrounded by an electromagnetically bound swarm of electrons. The chemical elements are distinguished fr ...
s.
A
scanning tunneling microscope
A scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is a type of scanning probe microscope used for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. Its development in 1981 earned its inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, then at IBM Zürich, the Nobel Prize in ...
was used to arrange 35 individual
xenon
Xenon is a chemical element; it has symbol Xe and atomic number 54. It is a dense, colorless, odorless noble gas found in Earth's atmosphere in trace amounts. Although generally unreactive, it can undergo a few chemical reactions such as the ...
atoms on a substrate of chilled crystal of
nickel
Nickel is a chemical element; it has symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel is a hard and ductile transition metal. Pure nickel is chemically reactive, but large pieces are slo ...
to spell out the three letter company
initialism
An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial letter of each word in all caps wi ...
. It was the first time that atoms had been precisely positioned on a flat surface.
Research
Donald Eigler and Erhard Schweizer of the
IBM Almaden Research Center
IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company. IBM Research is headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, near IBM headquarters ...
in
San Jose, California
San Jose, officially the City of San José ( ; ), is a cultural, commercial, and political center within Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. With a city population of 997,368 and a metropolitan area population of 1.95 million, it is ...
, discovered the ability using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to move atoms about the surface.
In the demonstration, where the microscope was used in low temperature,
they positioned 35 individual
xenon
Xenon is a chemical element; it has symbol Xe and atomic number 54. It is a dense, colorless, odorless noble gas found in Earth's atmosphere in trace amounts. Although generally unreactive, it can undergo a few chemical reactions such as the ...
atoms on a substrate of chilled crystal of
nickel
Nickel is a chemical element; it has symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel is a hard and ductile transition metal. Pure nickel is chemically reactive, but large pieces are slo ...
to form the acronym "IBM".
The pattern they created was 5
nm tall and 17 nm wide. They also assembled chains of xenon atoms similar in form to molecules.
The demonstrated capacity showed the potential of fabricating rudimentary structures and allowed insights as to the extent of device miniaturization.
See also
*
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
"There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics" was a lecture given by physicist Richard Feynman at the annual American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman considered the possibi ...
– Lecture by
Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of t ...
*
A Boy and His Atom – The world's smallest movie
References
External links
"IBM" in atoms at IBM's archives
Nanotechnology
IBM
Individual particles
Experiments
Scanning probe microscopy
Digital typography
1989 introductions
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