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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," says Cyrus Hirjibehedin, a scientist at IBM's Almaden Research Center. "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.

"What we've

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been able to do is to look at an iron atom on a copper surface and to move that magnetic orientation around," Heinrich says.

Now they are looking for an atom that remains stable over a long time. "We have a couple of ideas but we don't really know which ones will work out," Hirjibehedin claims. "In the very long run, we're shooting for data storage on a very tiny scale."

In a separate, but equally important development, IBM scientists in Switzerland have stumbled on a way to manipulate molecules to switch on and off, a basic function needed in computer logic. The scientists had been evaluating the vibration of a molecule when they noticed it had distinct switching capabilities.

Heinrich, who is familiar with the work, claims the discovery is especially important because the switching action does not alter the framework of the molecule. Molecular switches could be used to store information and would lead to super-fast, super-tiny computer chips.

The two discoveries, which were published in the journal Science, will one day form the basis of future devices that IBM scientists were reluctant to even speculate about.

"Put yourself in the situation of people in the '70s, where they had a roomful of computing equipment that could basically do what you can do nowadays on your cell phone," Heinrich says. "They would have given you some really stupid answers."