The Atoms That Spelled a Company's Name

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The scanning tunneling microscope did more than let physicists see atoms. It let them move them. In 1990, researchers at IBM Almaden lab used an STM tip to drag 35 individual xenon atoms across a nickel surface, one at a time, and arrange them to spell out the company's initials, the first time anyone had deliberately built a structure atom by atom. The demonstration was part publicity stunt and part serious proof of principle, if a tip could image a surface at atomic resolution, the same tip, under slightly different conditions, could push, pull or pick up single atoms and place them somewhere else. That capability became one of the founding tools of nanotechnology, the deliberate engineering of matter at the scale of individual atoms and molecules, and the STM's descendants, including the atomic force microscope developed a few years after Binnig and Rohrer's original instrument, remain standard equipment anywhere surfaces need to be understood, or built, one atom at a time.