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IBM Makes a Movie Out of Atoms
harrymcc writes "IBM's Almaden Research Center has a scanning tunneling microscope, a device invented by the company. It uses it to move individual atoms around — mostly for storage research. But it's created a 242-frame cartoon, A Boy and His Atom, using individual atoms as pixels. Guinness has certified it as the world's smallest movie."
242 frames, and ten 18-hour days of work by multiple people using a very tiny copper needle attached to an expensive machine to move the atoms around.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0&list=PLaFe0BJiho2pbiULC7W4UpxFGArH7oD7i&index=1
The making of the world's smallest movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0&list=PLaFe0BJiho2pbiULC7W4UpxFGArH7oD7i"
By Larry Greenemeier, Scientific Amererican:
What is the “final frontier”? Star Trek fans will tell you it’s space. Filmmaker/aquanaut James Cameron will tell you it’s the ocean’s depths. IBM, however, is thinking much smaller.
The company’s research division on Wednesday released a stop-motion movie whose main character is a stick figure only a few atoms in size. “A Boy and His Atom” is the story, not surprisingly, of a character named Atom who befriends a single atom and proceeds to play with his new friend by dancing, playing catch and bouncing on a trampoline. It may not be an Oscar-winning script, but the performance does mark a breakthrough in scientists’ ability to capture, position and shape individual atoms with precision using temperature, pressure and vibrations.
“Think of this as Claymation—you shape your Wallace and Gromit, put them in your scene and take a picture of it,” says Andreas Heinrich, principle investigator at IBM Research. “Then you change the position of the characters and take another picture.” Heinrich and his team arranged and rearranged atoms to create 242 distinct frames later stitched together to make their movie, which Guinness World Records has certified as the tiniest stop-motion film ever made.
IBM researchers relied on a bit of movie magic to bring Atom to life (see video below). Each of the dots used to make the character is actually a molecule of carbon monoxide resting on a copper surface, framed so that the audience can see only the oxygen atoms (the carbon atoms are off screen). The researchers used a two-ton scanning tunneling microscope to magnify the atoms’ surfaces more than 100 million times. The microscope features an extremely sharp needle that the researchers used to move the molecules to specific locations.
This ability to manipulate individual atoms has big implications for the future of computing and communications. Engineers have managed to shrink certain components within today’s magnetic disk drives down to a few dozen nanometers. “We’re interested in exploring data movement and storage at the atomic scale,” the stuff of quantum computing, Heinrich says. Whereas a classic computer uses bits—a zero or a one—to store information, a quantum computer lets you—in principle at least—have a zero and a one at the same time in a quantum bit (or a qubit).” If you can do both of these at the same time, you can calculate answers faster than any computer using classic bits,” he says, adding that his lab’s mission is to determine whether atoms can someday be harnessed for computation and data storage.
In a tie-in with the upcoming film "Star Trek into Darkness," IBM Research created this nanometer-sized image of the Enterprise. Courtesy of IBM Research.
IBM researchers decided to make their movie last year after publishing the results of years of atomic storage experiments, Heinrich says. “The general public should know about this kind of work and be interested in it,” he adds. “The best way to do that is to make a movie that is told in the language of science although doesn’t necessarily tell a scientific story. It tells a human story of a boy dancing with his friend.”
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/05/01/ibm-movie-does-claymation-at-the-atomic-scale-video/
Thanks for doing the math. I had it all written out and was starting to work on it, and I actually had to go *do my job.* Do they not realize what important work we do here in Slashdot discussions?
I believe those are actually a visualization of the atoms' electrons moving across the copper surface... you can see constructive and destructive destruction of the waves around the boy. If you look at this stm image ( http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/files/us-flinte/stm16.jpg ), the bottom right image shows the wave function of electrons completely trapped inside the circle of atoms.
Remember, this is scanning tunneling microscopy, so the electrons are not actually going in and out of the plane... what we're seeing is their potential to tunnel into the tip of the microscope.
I'm pretty sure they were just making a joke. The title of his post states that it's a waste because it isn't porn, making reference to the joke that the Internet is made for porn and that sadly porn often ends up pushing media technology to be adopted by consumers.
AJ Henderson