IBM Scientists Position Individual Atoms -- First to Build Structures One Atom At a Time

April 5, 1990

On April 5, 1990, two scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., reported that they had learned how to position individual atoms on a surface and had used the technique to build structures one atom at a time. This achievement creates the potential for many future applications. Among the possibilities are: building custom-made molecules atom-by-atom, altering individual molecules, making ultra-small electrical circuits far smaller than is possible today, storing data on an atomic scale at densities more than a million times greater than is now possible and perhaps even duplicating structures atom-for-atom. More immediately, the new technique will assist scientists in studying the fundamental behavior of atoms on surfaces. This knowledge is crucial to everyday industrial processes, such as catalyzing chemical reactions and manufacturing semiconductors. Physicists Donald M. Eigler and Erhard K. Schweizer described their achievement in the cover story of the April 5 issue of Nature, the British science journal. Eigler is a research staff member at Almaden; Schweizer was a visiting scientist at Almaden on leave from the Fritz-Haber-Institut in Berlin when this work was done in November 1989. To demonstrate their new technique, the scientists first moved atoms of the element xenon across a nickel single crystal surface into a pattern forming the letters "IBM." Later, they created the first-ever atomic cluster built one atom at a time -- a chain of seven xenon atoms bound together. These demonstrations required the atoms to be cooled to minus 269 degrees Celsius (minus 453 degrees Fahrenheit), which is only slightly warmer than the absolute zero of temperature. In the "IBM" written with xenon atoms, each letter is about 500,000 times smaller than those on this page. The atoms are separated by only about 50 billionths of an inch, or 13 Angstroms.