IBM scientists create world’s smallest film

PanARMENIAN.Net - Scientists from IBM have created the world’s smallest film, made with thousands of atoms, TechEye reports.

Approved by the Guinness World of Records, the film, aptly named “A Boy and His Atom,” uses thousands of precisely placed atoms to create nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action.

It's a story about a character named Atom who befriends a single atom and goes on a playful journey that includes dancing, playing catch and bouncing on a trampoline. Set to a musical track, the film is said to represent a unique way to convey science outside the research community.

In order to make the film the atoms were moved with an IBM-made scanning tunneling microscope, which lets scientists visualize the world all the way down to single atoms.

IBM said it weighs two tons, operates at a temperature of negative 268 degrees Celsius and magnifies the atomic surface over 100 million times.

Remotely operated on a standard computer, IBM researchers used the microscope to control a super-sharp needle along a copper surface to “feel” atoms. Only one nanometer away from the surface, which is a billionth of a meter in distance, the needle can physically attract atoms and molecules on the surface and thus pull them to a precisely specified location on the surface. The moving atom makes a unique sound that is critical feedback in determining how many positions it has actually moved.

As the movie was being created, the scientists rendered still images of the individually arranged atoms, resulting in 242 single frames.

IBM said that, for decades, scientists have studied materials at the nanoscale to explore the limits of data storage, among other things.