Twenty years ago, Don Eigler worked as an IBM researcher and carved a name for himself by introducing the 35 Xenon atom arrangements for Big Blue. It turned out to have some pretty serious consequences as a result, so the company shifted its focus on producing nanotechnology as the basic foundation instead of moving atoms. They encrypted information on gold atoms, put together a bunch of molecules and turned it into logic circuits and voila – a better and brighter vision for compact computing technology.

Eiger now stands as a fellow of IBM, and ever since the day he moves an atom using a device called scanning tunneling microscope, he remains boggled. after programming the system, we waited for something to happen on the screen – and all that came up was a blank monitor during the experiment. But the lesson there was that the science of the matter is all about reproducibility, and in 1989 he was able to spell out IBM by arranging the thirty five atoms. After it, things started looking up.

More Than Just a Publicity Stunt

The attention it got wasn't the only thing he and IBM intended to generate after the experiment. by moving the atoms using the telescope, they've been thinking about the kind of technology this could be utilized for in the future. Further branches of nanotechnology research have since then opened up, and Eiger's personal interest rests on the use of quantum mechanical property among other things. His goal? To build a fully-working electronic device without needing to move around any electrons at all by the use of spin engineering. Consider it as a ripple effect, wherein one spin of an atom will affect its neighbor – but the gain full control of the effect you need to arrange the atoms in a specific manner to come up with useful and relevant results. The solution was thought up by IBM's Gerhard Meyer from its Zurich Research Lab, where he pondered the idea of storing data on gold atoms. Apparently, it stores and releases energy in an efficient and orderly manner compared to any other type of material, which produces the desired operational effect. This went down in computer history as the start of a technological revolution.

The Challenge

To further improve on this, the notion of nano plug-ins, should engineers and physicists figure out how they can put more units together and have them working effectively to store bigger data without necessarily becoming bigger in actual physical size. Eiger says that building upon the gold atoms might seem like a small-scale attempt in micro technology, but is definitely a look into the future. Despite the failure of Eiger's spin-based computation, it can still be altered with the use of other technology and materials like carbon nanotubes and graphene. Such musings account for the investments that they at IBM Labs have made into exploring other possible ventures in this arena. At the moment, the knowledge they gain as a result of these trials will bring them closer to the kind of technology which will be the summit of all their efforts since then.

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