IBM's atomic art on display

Tony Austin
Saturday, 08 September 2007 15:23

Opinion and Analysis

IBM scientists in 1990 famously wrote the letters of the company name by very carefully arranging single atoms. Now an online gallery of such atomic images has been opened for our wonder and delight.

Starting on 14 August 2007, the atomic images are featured in The Art of Invention, an exhibit co-created by The National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation (NIHFF) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for the USPTO Museum in Alexandria, VA.

These atomic-sized structures are built using a low-temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM), an invention that won the 1986 Nobel Prize in physics for Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer of IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland.

In the new exhibition, the famous "I-B-M" image constructed with Xenon atoms is there, along with "The Quantum Corral" plus "The Search For Quantum Chaos" and quite a few others, all fascinating.

The IBM press release for the exhibition is at The World's Tiniest Art on Display.

There are more images on display at the IBM Almaden Research Laboratory's Moving Atoms - STM Gallery