IBM scientists at the Almaden Research Centre in San Jose have been playing God – and honouring the company – with a demonstration of use of an electron tunnelling microscope to build structures one atom at a time, making possible the building of custom molecules atom-by-atom, altering individual molecules, making ultra-small electrical circuits, storing data on an atomic scale at densities more than a million times greater than is now possible and perhaps even duplicating structures atom-for-atom; the demonstration involved moving Xenon atoms into a pattern forming the letters IBM and creating an atomic cluster of seven Xenon atoms one atom at a time; the work had to be done at supercooled minus 269oC.
