You can find another movie of actual atoms taken by me at my website.

https://avsteele.com/index.html#science (scroll down a little)

Each dot is fluorescence from a single trapped barium ion. Excitation/fluorescence is at 493 nm, so the false-color map in the video is almost realistic.

More details are in the figure caption.

This is one of my favorite SPM videos.

My company makes an Scanning Probe Microscope (more commonly known as an AFM) which goes into a Zeiss Scanning Electron Microscope. You can unlock some really neat applications with the combination - scanning areas which would be hard to locate, observing the tip interaction with the sample and using the Focused Ion Beam to remove material from the sample.

With SPM, you can do a variety of measurements - measure the topology, measure the electrical properties, surface potential, conductivity, etc.

Here's a neat video of the system in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrsoS5e39H8

The video explaining how this is done is also very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA4QWwaweWA

The informative part is 2:57–3:23.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA4QWwaweWA&t=2m57s

One thing that I don't quite get. If a single atom is the smallest thing (other than quantum foam etc), then what is it resting on in this movie. IE what is the background made of?

The background is a copper plate.

"Copper plate: The scientists used copper 111 as the surface of the animation — the same material they used 10 years ago when they built the first computer that performed digital computation operations. Carbon monoxide (CO): ok The scientists chose carbon monoxide molecules to move around the plate. Carbon monoxide has one carbon atom and one oxygen atom, stacked on top of each other."

http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/madewithatoms.shtml#fbi...

I assume focus / depth of field is why the surface looks smooth. Or whatever the equivalent of that is for a scanning/tunnelling microscope.

One thing I don't understand with that quote: it seems to imply this video was made only ten years after "first computer that performed digital computation operations". Is this a typo in the original or are they referring to something else?

Probably something like logic gates assembled by moving atoms around?

Smoothness is likely due to the grounding of the backplate.

If anything I would posture that they’ve filmed the backplate and the A atoms are the shadow from the scattering of the electrons that didn’t hit the backplate.

Atoms aren't the smallest thing, but that's sort of irrelevant, because this was "filmed" with a scanning tunneling microscope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope

It's not like normal photography, it's more of a visualization of an electrical current sensor. The background is just the area of the plane they were scanning that didn't have any atoms.

> didn't have any atoms

That sounds a bit weird...

Didn't have any atoms sitting on it.

Well what was 'it' if it wasn't made of atoms?

A slice of quantum foam.

Not quite.

Just empty space. There's a smooth plane of atoms, then a few atoms that make up your frame on top of that, and everything else is vacuum.

Other atoms, but further away. Effectively the background is blurred because it's out of focus. The depth of field is thin enough that this works. (These are analogies. It's not strictly correct.)

It's so far from correct as to be not a useful analogy.

The real question is, how is the microscope's output converted into a visual picture? Hint, it isn't by lensing light. Thus there is no "focus" to be out of.

An atomic force microscope produces images by sensing atoms with a probe. It scans in a planar layer, analogous to a very narrow depth of field for a film camera. The background atoms do exert force on the probe, but much more weakly.

I presume it's sitting on a flat layer of other atoms, but they are picturing only the top layer, kind of how a focused photo has a blurry background.

Pedantically speaking, most movies are made by filming actual atoms.

In that case, all data storage is already atomic.

But not at a high enough resolution to distinguish one atom from another, nor to see how an individual atom behaves.

This is interesting, but it was also posted to Youtube in 2013. Could we get an updated title with that information?

Could you build a super advanced processor with this SPM technology? Has this been done already by anyone?

How many other tech companies fund fundamental research like this? Has it come down to just IBM?

What exactly are the fields appearing around each atom?

They are part of the atom - the electron cloud around the nucleus. https://phys.org/news/2015-10-electron-orbitals-molecules-d....

Electron clouds? Maybe?

Reminds me of Dancing Demon for the TRS-80

What kind of atoms are they?

They're molecules of carbon monoxide, according to the making-of clip.