A Boy and His Atom

A Boy and His Atom
The atom (left) and the boy. This film was made using individual carbon monoxide molecules and photographed using a scanning tunneling microscope.
Directed by	Nico Casavecchia
Production company	1st Ave Machine
Distributed by	IBM Research
Release date	April 30, 2013 (2013-04-30)
Running time	1 minute 33 seconds
Language	English

A Boy and His Atom is a 2013 stop-motion animated short film released on YouTube by IBM Research. One minute in length, it was made by moving carbon monoxide molecules with a scanning tunneling microscope, a device that magnifies them 100 million times. These two-atom molecules were moved to create images, which were then saved as individual frames to make the film.^[1] The movie was recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the World's Smallest Stop-Motion Film in 2013.^[2]

The scientists at IBM Research – Almaden who made the film are moving atoms to explore the limits of data storage because, as data creation and consumption gets bigger, data storage needs to get smaller, all the way down to the atomic level. Traditional silicon transistor technology has become cheaper, denser and more efficient, but fundamental physical limitations suggest that scaling down is an unsustainable path to solving the growing Big Data dilemma. This team of scientists is particularly interested in starting on the smallest scale, single atoms, and building structures up from there. Using this method, IBM announced it can now store a single bit of information in just 12 atoms (current technology as of 2012 takes roughly one million atoms to store a single bit).^[1][3]