"A Boy And His Atom" The World's Smallest Movie.
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"A Boy And His Atom" The World's Smallest Movie.
My chemistry teacher from last semester showed me and a couple of other kids from our class this today. I found it really cool and HAD to share it here lol.
World's Tiniest Movie Uses Atoms As Actors
By: Rose Pastore
May 1, 2013
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Scientists at IBM Research have just earned a Guinness world record for the smallest movie ever: They created a stop-motion film by moving atoms, one at a time, across a copper surface. The result is the sweet story of a boy named Atom, who befriends a single atom and then goes dancing, plays catch and jumps on a trampoline.
To make the 242-frame film, principle investigator Andreas Heinrich and his team used a two-ton scanning tunneling microscope, cooled to -450 degrees Fahreinheit, to magnify the atoms more than 100 million times.
The scanning tunneling microscope isn't an optical microscope. A robot arm moves a tiny needle (its tip is a single atom) across the copper surface in a scanning pattern, "like an old-fashioned TV tube," Heinrich explains. The needle is programmed to stay a certain distance away from the surface, so when it encounters an atom, it pulls up and creates a bump in the image. To move an atom, the researchers lower the needle to push or pull it to a new position on the copper surface.
Each of the ball-bearing-like dots in the movie is actually made of two atoms, which form single carbon monoxide molecules. The ripples that appear around them are a result of free-floating electrons trapped in the ultra-smooth copper surface. "If you disturb the 2-D electron gas surface by moving atoms on it, you see ripples," Heinrich says. "These electrons are free, like atoms in a gas, except they are stuck on the surface."
It took four scientists working in shifts over 10 18-hour days to create "A Boy and His Atom." In the end, they moved about 10,000 atoms with the scanning tunneling microscope. The character Atom is made of about 120-130 atoms.
Last year, the same group of IBM researchers used the scanning tunneling microscope to create the world's smallest memory bit, which stores data using only 12 atoms.
Source: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
"A Boy And His Atom" Movie: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
How the movie was made: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
World's Tiniest Movie Uses Atoms As Actors
By: Rose Pastore
May 1, 2013
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]
Scientists at IBM Research have just earned a Guinness world record for the smallest movie ever: They created a stop-motion film by moving atoms, one at a time, across a copper surface. The result is the sweet story of a boy named Atom, who befriends a single atom and then goes dancing, plays catch and jumps on a trampoline.
To make the 242-frame film, principle investigator Andreas Heinrich and his team used a two-ton scanning tunneling microscope, cooled to -450 degrees Fahreinheit, to magnify the atoms more than 100 million times.
The scanning tunneling microscope isn't an optical microscope. A robot arm moves a tiny needle (its tip is a single atom) across the copper surface in a scanning pattern, "like an old-fashioned TV tube," Heinrich explains. The needle is programmed to stay a certain distance away from the surface, so when it encounters an atom, it pulls up and creates a bump in the image. To move an atom, the researchers lower the needle to push or pull it to a new position on the copper surface.
Each of the ball-bearing-like dots in the movie is actually made of two atoms, which form single carbon monoxide molecules. The ripples that appear around them are a result of free-floating electrons trapped in the ultra-smooth copper surface. "If you disturb the 2-D electron gas surface by moving atoms on it, you see ripples," Heinrich says. "These electrons are free, like atoms in a gas, except they are stuck on the surface."
It took four scientists working in shifts over 10 18-hour days to create "A Boy and His Atom." In the end, they moved about 10,000 atoms with the scanning tunneling microscope. The character Atom is made of about 120-130 atoms.
Last year, the same group of IBM researchers used the scanning tunneling microscope to create the world's smallest memory bit, which stores data using only 12 atoms.
Source: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
"A Boy And His Atom" Movie: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
How the movie was made: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
WeAreTheWorld.- Posts : 1967
Join date : 2012-07-22
Age : 27
Location : United States
Re: "A Boy And His Atom" The World's Smallest Movie.
Wow, that's so cool!
midangerous- Posts : 3098
Join date : 2012-07-23
Age : 34
Location : United States
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