The boy and his atom

The world's smallest cartoon

The newspaper "Troitsky variant – Science" No. 128-2013

Specialists from IBM have "drawn" the world's smallest cartoon, which has already collected more than a million views and got into the Guinness Book of Records. All the frames of a small video lasting a little more than a minute were created from individual carbon monoxide CO molecules (they were apparently called atoms "for simplicity"), which moved along a copper-111 substrate using a scanning tunneling microscope. By the way, the STM itself was also developed by specialists from IBM's Zurich laboratory: in 1986, German Gerd Binning and Swiss Heinrich Rohrer received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the STM.

As a matter of fact, the IBM inscription laid out of 35 atoms at about the same time got into the Guinness Book of Records as the smallest inscription in the world.

The cartoon begins with a grouping of only 12 atoms, and this is not accidental. The fact is that last year IBM created a working memory cell (bit) of only a dozen atoms (modern cells consist of about a million atoms). It was in commemoration of this event that the cartoon "The Boy and his Atom" was created.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru14.05.2013