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What happens if you give scientists who grew up loving classic science-fiction television the technology to re-assemble individual atoms into shapes of their choosing? The answer is, of course, the greatest Star Trek fan art imaginable: images literally built out of individual atoms.
The images are the work of IBM scientists who created the unique artwork with a two-ton machine called the Scanning Tunneling Microscope that moves single atoms across a tiny piece of copper. The machine was invented by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer in 1981 as a way of "seeing" the atom, and re-purposed by another IBM scientist, Don Eigler, in 1989 when he discovered that the microscope could also move atoms before it took pictures of them.
"Think of it as a robot that has an arm, with a needle at the end that is sharp to the size of an atom," explained Andreas Heinrich, Principal Investigation for IBM Research. "With that sharp needle, we can move with extremely fine precision; we can move the point say, one atom to the left. We use that needle to move atoms or molecules that are sitting on top of a surface, and with this kind of precision, we can say 'Okay, I want to take one molecule or atom and I want to move it three atoms to the left.'"
Each point on these images represents one single atom on the copper plate. (We don't see the atoms that make up the copper plate itself because, according to Heinrich, the copper's surface is so smooth that it appears perfectly flat to the microscope.) Of course, working on such a small scale -- these images are magnified more than 100 million times from the originals -- has its drawbacks.
Although an image can be created in as little as five minutes once the scientists start moving the atoms, there's a complicated process ahead of time to map out just where the atoms need to be in order to make the image they want. "The atoms want to sit in a certain location," Heinrich said. "We can't move an atom half-an-atom to the left, we can only move it one whole atom to the left. That leaves a distinct set of possible points that we can use. There's a very limited set of 'pixels' that we have to work with."
That means a lot of planning ahead of time to create an atom map for each image, which is used as a guide for the finished product. "We start with the atoms in random locations, and we use the frame that's been located and move one to the right location, move another to the right location and check, did we do the right thing, before we move on and move as many as we need to make the final image," Heinrich said. Surprisingly, each atom is moved by hand, instead of through an automated process. "The moving part is really, really fun," Heinrich laughed. "It's not as tedious as it sounds."
And what better use for this technology than to create images in celebration of one of the greatest sci-fi franchises of all time? The two came together naturally, according to IBM Research's Ari Entin. "Star Trek fans tend to have an appreciation of science and technology," he said. "Some of the earliest Star Trek movies and TV shows inspired a whole new generation of scientists, so we thought that this would be an appropriate fit."
For Heinrich, there's an appropriate symmetry to the pairing. "Their claim to fame is that they're dealing with the final frontier, with space. What we're doing is dealing with the final frontier of engineering. The finest thing you'll ever deal with in engineering is atoms. There's nothing beyond that point," he said. "So, we're dealing with the final frontier of small, and they're dealing with the final frontier of large."
Despite the scale of the images, IBM Research is thinking bigger when it comes to using its atomic art. In addition to the Star Trek images, Heinrich's team have created an entire movie made up of frames created of atoms. Called A Boy and His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie, the minute-long short has been named "the world's smallest movie" by the Guinness World Records committee and racked up almost 2.5 million views on YouTube.
"The best thing that we can create is an interest in the general public, in kids, for science," Heinrich says. "That's what I want to achieve with this. I'll actually be at the EPCOT Center in Disney World in Florida this week, giving live presentations of the film and broadcasting them to schools across the country, to drive home the message that we want to get kids interested in science."
Scotty would be proud.
