IBM is once again in the avant-garde of technological breakthroughs: its engineers have recently stumbled upon proto-method to store information on single atoms.

Already in front of competitors like Intel with the dazzling speed and outstanding performance of the recently unveiled PowerPC 6 processor and with fundamental contributions to the amazing Cell CPU included in every PlayStation 3 sold out there, IBM is now confirming its status of nanotechnology leader by announcing a scientific discovery that will certainly revolutionize the way we think about computers or storage devices today. This would not be the first time IBM claimed the king’s crown, since from 1981 the industry behemoth has kept on narrowing its inquisitive lenses to spot even the most intimate details of the matter that composes us all- and shows no signs of stopping. From the Scanning Tunneling Microscope that brought company employees Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1986 to the atomic switch, the single-wall carbon nanotubes or the molecular wheel, IBM has always situated itself on the forefront of nanotechnology, and the most recent find to come out of its labs is enough proof for that. 

IBM underlined that there’s is still a long way ahead until we’ll get to experience the benefits of this breakthrough in our day-to-day lives, but the major steps towards that reality have firmly been made. First of all, the scientific data has been published in today’s issue of Science Magazine.

But what exactly did IBM discover that is so exciting? Well, let’s start with a bit of history first.

Civilization has advanced as people have begun discovering new ways of exploiting various physical resources such as materials, forces and energies. In the twentieth century information was added to the list when the invention of computers allowed complex information processing to be performed outside human brains. The history of computer technology has involved a sequence of changes from one type of physical realization to another- from gears to relays to valves to transistors to integrated circuits and so on. Today’s advanced lithographic techniques can create chips with features only a fraction of micron wide (a micron is a micrometer, i.e. a millionth of a meter). That would allow Intel for example to pack more than 80 cores on a single die, boosting the processing prowess of our future PCs to levels almost unimaginable today.

And since we’ve talked about Intel, one of the company’s co-founders, Gordon Moore, is said to have enunciated in 1965 the famous law that now bears his name, in which he quite accurately predicted that at every two years the power of the processors will double, thanks to the doubling of the number of transistors that can be packed in an integrated circuit.

However the miniaturization process that affects the transistors has its physical limits, a quantum threshold below which transistors will cease to function, because the electrons will break the barriers that currently force them to move on a certain trajectory. So it’s natural to think that the current generation of transistors will soon disappear from CPU architects’ plans, replaced not by even by a new, “tinier” generation, but by a whole new way of thinking about computing. And that is quantum computing.

This is the domain where IBM has had its moments of glory in the past, and where it has advanced these days. Ok, it’s not like IBM is ready to develop the first quantum computer, but the breakthrough work of its engineers is making that ideal seem closer.

It’s called magnetic anisotropy and until now it has been a mystery for all scientists. Ferromagnetic materials exhibit intrinsic `easy' and `hard' directions of the magnetization. Magnetic anisotropy is the most important property of magnetic materials, from both technological and fundamental point of view. Depending on the type of application, materials with high, medium or low magnetic anisotropy will be required for building permanent magnets, information storage media or magnetic cores in transformers and magnetic recording heads. 

Hence a better understanding about the microscopic origin of the magnetic anisotropy is necessary to tailor the properties of magnetic materials. IBM has known for a long time that harnessing the “power” of magnetic anisotropy is the key to develop structures and devices of atomic and sub-atomic scales, which would later become for example the building bricks of incredibly small, but also incredibly “generous” storage equipments. So they’ve focused their attention on how to measure the magnetic anisotropy of individual atoms, an endeavor previously considered inaccessible.

Measuring an atom’s magnetic anisotropy is vital for isolating its capacity to store information, thus opening insights into quantum storage. In 1959, physics icon Richard Feynman, in a characteristic back-of-the-envelope calculation, predicted that all the words written in the history of the world could be contained in a cube of material one two-hundredths of an inch wide - provided those words were written with atoms. Scientists from IBM have managed to partially confirm Feynman’s theory and to give God his share of the glory and greatness for his inventiveness: our DNA uses 32 atoms to store information in one half of the chemical base pair that is the fundamental unit that makes up genetic information.

With further work it may be possible to build structures consisting of small clusters of atoms, or even individual atoms, that could reliably store magnetic information. Such a storage capability would enable nearly 30,000 feature length movies or the entire contents of YouTube – millions of videos estimated to be more than 1,000 trillion bits of data- to fit in a device the size of an iPod. Perhaps more importantly, the breakthrough could lead to new kinds of structures and devices that are so small they could be applied to entire new fields and disciplines beyond traditional computing.

“One of the major challenges for the IT industry today is shrinking the bit size used for data storage to the smallest possible features, while increasing the capacity,” said Gian-Luca Bona, manager of science and technology at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. “We are working at the ultimate edge of what is possible – and we are now one step closer to figuring out how to store data at the atomic level. Understanding the specific magnetic properties of atoms is the cornerstone of progressing toward new, more efficient ways to store data.”

In the second report- a paper titled “Current-Induced Hydrogen Tautomerization and Conductance Switching of Naphthalocyanine Molecules”- IBM researchers unveiled the first single-molecule switch that can operate flawlessly without disrupting the molecule's outer frame- a significant step toward building computing elements at the molecular scale that are vastly smaller, faster and use less energy than today's computer chips and memory devices. 

In addition to switching within a single molecule, the researchers also demonstrated that atoms inside one molecule can be used to switch atoms in an adjacent molecule, representing a rudimentary logic element. This is made possible partly because the molecular framework is not disturbed.

These molecular switches could one day lead to computer chips with speeds as fast as today's fastest supercomputers, but much smaller in size; with some speculating even building computer chips so small they could be the size of a speck of dust or fit on the tip of a needle.

Although the IBM Research team had been screening various molecules to discover if they would be suitable for molecular switches, in the case of naphthalocyanine, the tests being performed were not to observe switching but rather to examine molecular vibrations, since understanding vibrations of molecules is important for devices operating at the atomic level. During those tests, team members were surprised to observe results that were intriguing for switching at the molecular scale, and they shifted their focus from studying vibrations to studying switching, leading to this breakthrough. 

“One of the beauties of doing exploratory science is that by researching one area, you sometimes stumble upon other areas of major significance,” said Gerhard Meyer, senior researcher in the nanoscale science group at the IBM Zurich lab. “Although the discovery of this breakthrough was accidental, it may prove to be significant for building the computers of the future.”