News Revisited

IBM has published a couple of interesting papers in the journal Science describing steps toward storage devices using single atoms as bits and computers using single molecules as logic gates reports physicsworld.com.  They used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to place a single magnetic atom on a copper-nitride film in such a way that its magnetic moment points in a particular direction.  They also discovered that a single molecule of naphthalocyanine can be switched “on” or “off” without changing it shape.  Prior attempts at switching molecules caused them to change shape and therefore would not be appropriate for a molecular logic gate.

Henry Chapman from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and colleagues developed a way to image a nanoscale object using ultra-fast X-ray pulses from a free-electron laser in approximately one femtosecond.  A femtosecond is one thousandth of one millionth of one millionth of one second.  According to the Wikipedia.org page about femtoseconds, that’s one hundredth of the time it takes light to travel the width of a human hair.  That’s seriously fast.

The advantage to this speed is that it provides scientists a way to image individual stages within chemical reactions and other extremely fast events at the nano-scale.  Currently they can resolve down to 50 nanometers (half the size of a chromozome) but say that using a shorter wavelength laser should provide spatial resolution down to one nanometer (half the diameter of a DNA molecule).

Scientists have been researching