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.

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Re:DPI?

[Mystakaphoros]

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?

Re:What are the ripples around the atoms?

[tocsy]

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 [ibm.com] ), 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.

Re:Wait... it's not porn

[AJH16]

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.