A Boy and His Atom: the world’s smallest movie

May 1, 2013

You’re about to see the movie that holds the Guinness World Records record for the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film (see how it was made here). The ability to move single atoms — the smallest particles of any element in the universe — is crucial to IBM’s research in the field of atomic memory. But even nanophysicists need to have a little fun. In that spirit, IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other), all in pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times. A movie made with atoms.

— IBM