This was a video created by IBM and is officially the worlds smallest stop motion film. It was created to celebrate IBM creating the smallest magnetic memory bit (comprised of only 12 atoms, the current norm is around 1,000,000 atoms, so not bad work!). So to celebrate this, they used the technology in their lab to create a stop motion film .... of individual atoms!
The project was "filmed" using what's called a scanning tunnelling microscope (which was actually invented by IBM researchers who got the Nobel Prize in Physics for it in 1986). Now, your normal everyday microscope won't cut it to see atoms, in fact you can't even use light to see atoms, so the scanning tunnelling microscope works by gently moving a super-fine needle above atoms of the material being "imaged". As the needle moves over a particular atom, a mini-chemical bond is formed between the atom and the needle tip, this can be measured through the needle. The needle tip is moved ("scanned") from left to right, right to left, left to right moving down the material. When something is higher (closer to the needle), then a stronger bond can be detected, but if the atom is far away from the needle then only a weak bond can be detected. As the needle "scans" the material to be imaged, all this data is then compiled into a viewable image!
For this film, the researchers used the bond formed between the tip and the atom to actually move some atoms around, to create a picture! Then they moved them again and took another, and so on to create this amazing stop motion film.
Each small globe is ONE INDIVIDUAL ATOM of carbon monoxide. Think about that for a second!
IBM did a (fairly) easy to follow video on how they made the atoms move, they may do a better job than I did:
And that's it! Hope you enjoyed it, fairly simple concept but done really really well in my opinion!
PS. Apologies to all physicists reading this, hate mail can be addressed to me personally :)
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