Carbon monoxide molecules serve as pixels in the world’s smallest stop-motion animation, “A Boy And His Atom.” A team of IBM researchers shot the film with a scanning tunneling microscope that magnified the image 100 million times. The microscope was also used to move the carbon monoxide molecules for each frame of the animation. For more on how researchers created the animation, see this making-of video. The film was made during the course of IBM’s research into atomic-scale memory. In 2012, IBM researchers used 12 atoms to store one bit of data—current technology requires 1,000,000 atoms to store the same information.
Posts tagged "atomic"
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A Boy And His Atom, Single Molecules Serve as Pixels in The World’s Smallest Animation →
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No assembly required for new micro particles →
Scientists have created new kinds of particles—1/100th the diameter of a human hair—that “self-assemble” into structures that look like molecules made from atoms.
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First ‘atomtronic’ radio broadcasts matter waves →
Scientists at the University of Colorado and National Institute for Standards and Technology in Boulder have built a “matterwave oscillator circuit” — one that works with atoms rather than electrons, Technology Review Physics arXiv Blog reports.
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Write speeds for phase-change memory reach record limits →
By pre-organizing atoms in a bit of phase-change memory, information can be written in less than one nanosecond, the fastest for such memory. With write speeds comparable to the memory that powers our computers, phase change memory could one day help computers boot up instantly.
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X-Ray Laser Able to Snap Photos of Electrons →
Superman may make it seem easy, but it’s actually difficult to create narrow, directed beams of X-rays. While visible-light lasers have been common for a decade as presentation pointers and cat toys, the first X-ray laser wasn’t created until two years ago. Now a team of scientists is announcing today (June 7) that they’ve created a newer, smaller X-ray laser. It is the first model that fits on a table and doesn’t require a miles-long particle accelerator to produce the X-ray beam.
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World's First 'Atomic' Movie Is Stored in Vapor →
Many people keep favorite Hollywood films or TV shows on solid DVDs or Blu-ray discs, but quantum physicists wanted to go beyond solid storage devices. They stored and replayed two letters of the alphabet in a gaseous atomic vapor — the first time images have ever been reliably stored in a nonsolid medium.
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How Do You Weigh an Atom? →
Imagine plopping an atom down on a scale. As you do so, skin cells that are trillions of atoms thick flake off your hand and flutter down all around it, burying it in a pile of atomic doppelgangers. Meanwhile, moisture and atmospheric particles shoot about, bouncing on and off the scale and sending its atom-sensitive needle whipping back and forth like a windshield wiper. And by the way, how did you manage to isolate a single atom in the first place?
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New technique uses electrons to map nanoparticle atomic structures →
With dimensions measuring billionths of a meter, nanoparticles are way too small to see with the naked eye. Yet it is becoming possible for today’s scientists not only to see them, but also to look inside at how the atoms are arranged in three dimensions using a technique called nanocrystallography. Trouble is, the powerful machines that make this possible, such as x-ray synchrotrons, are only available at a handful of facilities around the world. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory is one of them — home to the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) and future NSLS-II, where scientists are using very bright, intense x-ray beams to explore the small-scale structure of new materials for energy applications, medicine, and more.
But a Brookhaven/Columbia Engineering School team of scientists, in collaboration with researchers at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Northwestern University, has also been working to develop nanocrystallography techniques that can be used in more ordinary science settings. They have shown how a powerful method called atomic pair distribution function (PDF) analysis — which normally requires synchrotron x-rays or neutrons to discern the atomic arrangements in nanoparticles — can be carried out using a transmission electron microscope (TEM) — an instrument found in many chemistry and materials science laboratories.
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No-fuss device delivers entangled photons →
A new device could move supercomputing out of the lab by making it faster and easier to produce a special class of photons.
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An analog quantum computer made of cold atoms used to simulate electrons' spins →
Many of the most exciting properties of materials arise due to interactions between electrons. Correlations between electrons’ spins are involved in magnetism and may be responsible for high-temperature superconductivity—yet it’s tough to get theory to match our experimental results. The major reason for the difficulty lies in how quickly they scale: the more interactions between spins, the more difficult it is to calculate their effects. As few as 30 interacting spins reaches the limits of modern computers.
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Optical trap catches atoms swinging in time to theory →
It’s bizarre to feel awestruck and disappointed at the same time. Yet this is often how I feel when I read articles about ultracold atoms and Bose Einstein condensates. I’ll get to the awesome and awestruck parts later, but let me explain my disappointment. These experiments sit right at the boundary between classical and quantum physics. When we play with ultracold atoms, we make macroscopic objects do quantum things. And what have we discovered? That quantum mechanics is pretty much correct.
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Scientists discover a surprising new way that protons can move among molecules →
When a proton – the bare nucleus of a hydrogen atom – transfers from one molecule to another, or moves within a molecule, the result is a hydrogen bond, in which the proton and another atom like nitrogen or oxygen share electrons. Conventional wisdom has it that proton transfers can only happen using hydrogen bonds as conduits, “proton wires” of hydrogen-bonded networks that can connect and reconnect to alter molecular properties.
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Neutron-based clock could remain accurate for billions of years →
A new form of atomic clock could last as long as the lifespan of the entire universe so far. Professor Victor Flambaum of the University of New South Wales School of Physics has found a way to use the orbit of an atom’s neutron as a clock that could be 100 times more accurate than current atomic clocks, which measure the orbit of electrons. “We have shown that by using lasers to orient the electrons in a very specific way, one can use the orbiting neutron of an atomic nucleus as the clock pendulum,” says Flambaum, “making a so-called nuclear clock with unparalleled accuracy.”
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Rice lab mimics Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids inside a single atom
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'Squeezed' quantum vacuum filled with atoms →
Quantum theory is known for its peculiar concepts that appear to contradict the fundamental principles of traditional physics. Researchers from Heidelberg University have now succeeded in creating a special quantum state between two mesoscopic gases with approximately 500 atoms.
