Scientists at IBM said on Thursday that they had moved closer to developing ultra-tiny storage devices(imagine 30,000 full-length movies on an iPod) by learning how to steer single atoms in a way that could create building blocks for such hard drives. Understanding and manipulating the behavior of atoms is critical to harnessing the power of nanotechnology, which deals with particles tens of thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. "
One of the most basic properties that every atom has is that it behaves like a little magnet," said Cyrus Hirjibehedin, a scientist at International Business Machines Corp.'s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, in a phone interview. "
If you can keep that magnetic orientation stable over time, then you can use that to store information. That is how your hard drive works. What we are trying to understand is how this fundamental property works for a single atom." Hirjibehedin and colleague Andreas Heinrich studied this property-known as magnetic anisotropy-in individual iron atoms using a special microscope developed at IBM.
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