20 Years of Moving Atoms, One by One
- 8:31 pm |
Sometimes genius looks like an elegant equation written in chalk on a blackboard. Sometimes it’s a hodgepodge of wires, canisters and aluminum-foil-wrapped hoses, all held together by shiny bolts.
Despite its homebrew appearance, this device, a scanning tunneling microscope, is one of the most extraordinary lab instruments of the last three decades. It can pick up individual atoms one by one and move them around to create supersmall structures, a fundamental requirement for nanotechnology.
Twenty years ago this week, on Sept. 28, 1989, an IBM physicist, Don Eigler, became the first person to manipulate and position individual atoms. Less than two months later, he arranged 35 Xenon atoms to spell out the letters IBM. Writing those three characters took about 22 hours. Today, the process would take about 15 minutes.
“We wanted to show we could position atoms in a way that’s very similar to how a child builds with Lego blocks,” says Eigler, who works at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. “You take the blocks where you want them to go.”
Eigler’s breakthrough has big implications for computer science. For instance, researchers are looking to build smaller and smaller electronic devices. They hope, someday, to engineer these devices from the ground up, on a nanometer scale.
“The ability to manipulate atoms, build structures of our own, design and explore their functionality has changed people’s outlook in many ways,” says Eigler. “It has been identified as one of the starting moments of nanotech because of the access it gave us to atoms, even though no product has comes out of it.”
On the 20th anniversary of Eigler’s achievement, we look at the science, art and implications of moving individual atoms.