Illustration of a magnetically active iron atom under observation in the scanning tunneling microscope. (Credit: IBM Almaden-Research Center)

Reported for KQEDnews.org.

Imagine a future where iPods could store hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of songs, where smart phones could hold hundreds of Hollywood films, and where solar-powered cells become dramatically more efficient in converting light to electricity.

It’s a future that may be possible. IBM scientists in San Jose have developed a new technique to manipulate individual atoms and measure how long they can store information in real time, over just a few billionths of a second. Their work could radically shrink a computer’s hard drive, allowing data to be stored on it more efficiently.

The paper describing the research was published Friday as the cover story in the journal Science.

To observe the behavior of individual copper and iron atoms billionths of a meter in size, the scientists had to use a “scanning tunneling microscope,” a device invented by IBM researchers in 1981.

It isn’t your typical microscope.

IBM Postdoctoral Researcher Sebastian Loth next to the scanning tunneling microscope. (Credit: IBM Almaden-Research Center)

“The cool thing about the scanning tunneling microscope is that you can not only see these atoms, you can move them around,” said Sebastian Loth, a postdoctoral researcher at the IBM Almaden-Research Center, and the lead author of the paper.

The device uses a metallic-pointed tip mounted on a robotic arm to move with atomic-scale precision next to iron and copper atoms. Iron was chosen because it’s magnetically active, even at the scale of individual atoms. While the individual copper atoms aren’t magnetically active, they influence the duration the iron atoms stay magnetically active when they’re placed next to them.

Loth and his four other team members sent a current from the tip of the microscope to the iron atoms, which are like tiny bar magnets. The current causes the iron atom to become polarized, or to change its magnetic orientation, so instead of pointing north, it points south.

This is the information, or data, that the scientists observed and measured on the order of nanoseconds, or billionths of a second. The difference between one nanosecond and one second is equal to the difference between one second and 30 years.

It’s similar to the way a computer reads the bits of data stored on a computer chip. But here, instead of the typical sequence of ones and zeroes to indicate information, the scientists looked at magnetic information — the direction the iron atom pointed in and for how long it kept its magnetic orientation.

The scientists experimented with the number and placement of iron atoms next to copper atoms to find the right configuration that would yield the longest time frame an iron atom would hold its magnetic position.

“The particular structure that we studied is this combination of one iron and one copper atom right next to it, snuggling it. With this configuration, the iron atom it holds the magnetic information for 200 nanoseconds”, said Loth.

Closeup view of the IBM scanning tunneling microscope. (Credit: IBM Almaden-Research Center)

At the moment, the research team is exploring other configurations of iron and copper atoms to increase this length of time, which although extremely brief, is still long enough for meaningful activity to take place in today’s computers. For example, a laptop with a fast processor refreshes data constantly, every nanosecond. So in 200 nanoseconds, the computer has already performed a few hundred operations while its user is typing a document, surfing the web or checking email.

Today’s hard drives, as compact as they are, still require about 10,000 atoms to store one bit of data. Each bit is a magnet pointing up or down, referring to a one or a zero, which a sensor on the hard drive reads when it retrieves data. Since the IBM researchers showed that magnetic information can be stored and read out on just one iron atom, the real estate needed to store data could shrink enormously.

“If you could do atomic-scale data storage in a real device, you would have another 40 years in the development of Moore’s Law”, said Andreas Heinrich, a co-author of the paper and the research team leader.

Moore’s Law, coined in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every 18 months, allowing for an exponential increase in computing power and storage. At a certain point, which is fast approaching, the physical limitation of engineering such small silicon transistors will prevent this exponential progress in computer chip technology.

Nanotechnology, the science of manipulating particles billionths of a meter in size, is widely seen as the answer to leapfrog over the limitations of traditional silicon chip manufacturing.

“We want to get away from transistors, to come up with new schemes on single atoms that allow you to do computation and data storage differently, more efficiently with less power”, said Heinrich.

A key challenge the IBM scientists had to overcome was to somehow visualize the individual atoms’ magnetic behavior in real time, on the order of a few nanoseconds. The computer attached to their microscope generated a map of the location of the atoms but it was missing the crucial time component.

“We see these images of the atoms and they all look static,” said Loth. “The reason for that is that the scanning tunneling microscope is a slow technique. It takes minutes to get one of these images.”

But thanks to inspiration from a Sci-Fi blockbuster, the researchers were able to actually capture movies that show the evolution of magnetically active individual iron atoms, a million times faster than was previously possible.

“This was a true feat of five people sticking their heads together for days on end. We were all in the lab talking about this and I was thinking of these cool bullet shots from The Matrix, when the villain shoots at the good guy and you see the bullets stop in the air,” Loth said. “This is what we wanted to do. We wanted to freeze the motion so that we can inspect it and the way The Matrix movie guys did it, they just took a bunch of still pictures. So we took a bunch of still pictures too.”

Think of it as time-lapse photography, shot at the nano-scale. But since neither the microscope nor its attached computer have lenses, the “pictures” they generated were individual points of action, recorded every few nanoseconds, while manipulating the iron atoms.

The research team connected to their microscope a machine, a pulse pattern generator, to deliver extremely fast pulses of electricity from the metallic tip of the microscope to the iron atoms. After an iron atom was given a tiny electric current to initially polarize it and change its magnetic orientation from north to south, for example, a second, smaller current was then given to measure how strongly the atom held its magnetic orientation.

The process was repeated over and over again, generating individual frames of action every 2 or 3 nanoseconds to capture in real time the magnetic behavior of the iron atom.

“You have a defined delay between the initiating pulse and the reading pulse and this is what sets our time,” said Loth. “Instead of having to watch really closely and hope you catch this information in time, you predefine it by these pulses.”

The frames were then sequentially played back as a movie, with the various data the computer was collecting to refer to the location of the atom and its magnetic orientation, for example, converted into a map showing the dynamic activity of the iron atom over time. The six movies the team has generated today are about a minute long but they show action that was recorded over the space of one millionth of a second.

3D map illustration of iron atoms, with the strength of their magnetic polarization represented as yellow bars. (Credit: IBM Almaden-Research Center)

“Science is often close to an art. And one aspect of this is how you visualize your data in a way that looks most efficient and cool,” said Heinrich.

The ability to capture atomic activity in real time represents a major milestone.

“This is our effort to speed up nanoscience and put high-speed time into the nanoscience,” said Heinrich. “People were able to study nano-sized objects since the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope, and people were able to study fast phenomena using lasers, but they weren’t able to combine these two worlds.”

“This work is beautiful,” said Kathryn Moler, a professor of applied physics at Stanford University. “For information technology, it could mean a new generation of devices with better storage capabilities and lower power consumption,” she added.

The IBM researchers said they are confident that their breakthrough will spur innovation in other fields as well.

Heinrich said the microscope set-up could be “tuned to a different channel of information.” So instead of looking at the magnetic characteristics of an atom, scientists working on solar cells could track at the level of nanoseconds when a photon of light is converted into energy. Such work could yield better-designed solar cells that are more efficient at capturing light and converting it into electricity.

“As a scientist, sometimes you make a development or discovery that is truly great and this was one of those moments when I knew this was a great development and something to be really proud of,” he added.

Movie of iron atoms placed alongside copper atoms as they change their magnetic polarization over time. Red indicates high polarization and white indicates low polarization.(Credit: IBM Almaden-Research Center)

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 Color By Nano Educator Guide

Artist Kate Nichols longed to paint with the iridescent colors of butterfly wings, but no such pigments existed. So she became the first artist-in-residence at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to synthesize nanoparticles and incorporate them into her artwork. From the laboratory to the studio, see how Kate uses the phenomenon known as "structural color" to transform nanotechnology into creativity.

A carbon nanotube. Image courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

So many advances in renewable energy and transportation depend on battery technology that doesn’t yet exist. We need batteries with a high energy density that are lightweight and cheap for the widespread use of the energy of the sun when it is not shining, and the energy of the wind when it is not blowing. We need better battery technology to make hybrid and electric cars and trucks cheaper to make and cheaper to run than gasoline cars and trucks.

A battery the size, weight, and cost of a piece of paper would be ideal. This isn’t something out of the Jetsons. Today, with nanotechnology, scientists create super lightweight and super conducting tubes and wires using single atoms as the basic building blocks. Scientists at Stanford University are learning how to coat ordinary paper with an ink composed of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires to make an excellent energy storage device.

Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, is leading the research team that is creating the new batteries in the laboratory. The team has put the paper and ink batteries—quite literally—to the acid test. You can crumple the paper, or dip it in an acidic fluid, and it will still work. Dr. Cui and his colleagues published a report, “Highly Conductive Paper for Energy Storage Devices," in the online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The paper and ink storage devices, both as batteries or capacitors, may become the ideal energy storage medium for automobiles. Capacitors, which charge and release energy much more quickly than batteries, may be a better fit for automobiles, since car batteries charge and discharge quickly, compared to other energy storage devices. The lightweight, inexpensive, and energy dense batteries may be ideal for use in the electricity grid, to store energy when it is cheap and abundant and deliver it when it is expensive and hard to come by. And, since you can fold the ink and paper battery and it will still work—the self-powered paper airplane is a real possibility. We just need to get the mechanical engineers to come up with some lightweight flappers.

For more on technology, check out QUEST's "Nanotechnology Takes Off":

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Lawrence Berkeley Lab's TEAM 0.5 is capable of resolving individual carbon atoms in the honeycomb crystal structure of graphene. See QUEST's video The World's Most Powerful Microscope for more information. Image source: Nano Letters

Fifty years later, a new field of nanotechnology has exploded. At the cutting edge, researchers are successfully manufacturing everything from corporate logos to radios that are all small enough to be stacked end-to-end perhaps a million items long across the proverbial head of a pin. The advent of personal computers and smart phones has brought the power of such miniaturization into sharp focus for the general public. In a very real sense, we have all become bottom feeders. Below is a brief progress report on the state of the field.

Microscopes: The old adage “seeing is believing” was not lost on Feynman back in the late fifties. He noted that many of the most fundamental questions in biology could be readily solved if we only had the ability to see the molecules directly. Today, new inventions such as the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), the atomic force microscope (AFM), and the transmission electron microscope (TEM) have all achieved resolution at the scale where individual atoms can actually be seen and manipulated.

Miniature Motors: Perhaps the speech’s most imaginative scenario, due to Feynman’s friend (and graduate student) Albert Hibbs, was the concept of being able to “swallow the surgeon.” Feynman imagined that we might some day be able to construct robots capable of repairing or investigating the inner reaches of an ailing patient’s body. Mixing engineering and biology like this can run quickly into thorny ethical questions. Nevertheless, interesting progress has been made. Researchers in Alex Zettl’s group at UC Berkeley have recently constructed a nano motor, for example.

Information Storage: Using order-of-magnitude arguments, Feynman argued that the Encyclopedia Britannica could be squeezed into a pin’s area if the text were reduced by a factor of 25,000. He offered a $1,000 prize to the first person capable of printing one page of any book at this scale. Tom Newman, a graduate student at Stanford, first accomplished this in 1986 with an impressive reprinting of the first page of Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities. Today, you can buy the book in its entirety for only 1.9 megabytes. For a high-end smart phone with 30 gigabytes of memory, you could perhaps hold 15,000 books within the palm of your hand. Not bad.

Then again, at the extreme limit, Feynman also reasoned that you ought to be able to squeeze the text of every book that has ever been written (now more than 32 million titles according the Library of Congress) within the confines of a single speck of dust. We still have a long way to go.

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When I was assigned to work on our QUEST story on nanotechnology, I braced myself for the complex terrain ahead. The focus is on the public policy implications of the surge in consumer goods containing nanoparticles. And just how big is the market for nano-manufactured goods? According to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, a partnership between the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, there are hundreds of products available to consumers that contain manufactured nanomaterials. They run the gamut from tennis rackets to toothpaste to air purifiers and even stuffed animals which contain antibacterial nanosilver. Lux Research projects that the worldwide market for nano-manufactured goods will exceed 2 trillion dollars by 2014.

Meanwhile, the federal government has been criticized for failing to regulate more stringently the use of nanoparticles and for not investing enough dollars to study the effects of their exposure. Even when the federal authorities do act, like when they ruled that germ-killing products laced with nanosilver must be registered as pesticides, it makes you scratch your head at how outdated some of our environmental laws are and ill-equipped to deal with materials that came online after the laws were written.

The nuts and bolts of producing this story were challenging as well. To lay out the public policy debate, we needed to get opinions and facts from an environmental organization, the federal government and a firm that is actually manufacturing products at the nano-scale. I was also fortunate to get access to Kent Pinkerton and his colleagues at UC Davis, who are studying the exposure effects of quantum dots and carbon nanotubes on rodents. Special thanks goes to my Associate Producer, Jenny Oh, for securing an important interview with Dr. John Howard, the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. As I was about to commence my interview with Dr. Howard, I ran through with him the list of questions, including one about respirators and whether they would adequately protect exposure to materials that are thousands of times smaller than the human hair. Without missing a beat, Dr. Howard grabbed his pen, asked me for a sheet of paper and drew a sketch of a filter lattice, explaining how yes, thanks to Brownian motion, the tiny nanoparticles would be moving around so wildly that they would bounce off the surface of the lattice. Bigger particles, on the other hand, may get through the lattice.

Discussion about nanotechnology, its benefits, its risks, the knowns and unknowns will continue for some time. Perhaps QUEST will revisit nanotechnology as new breakthroughs emerge and science reveals more clearly how nanoparticles affect the environment and living organisms.

Watch the "Macro Concerns in a Nano World" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.

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Nanotechnology Takes Off and Journey into Darkness (episode #106), airs tonight on QUEST at 7:30pm on KQED 9, and KQED HD, Comcast 709. (full schedule)

You may also view the entire Nanotechnology Takes Off story online.

Josh Rosen is Series Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.