How to Move an Atom
SPIKE NARAYAN, WILLIAM OLIVER AND THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING
A VISIT TO ALMADEN
In the fall of 2005 I drove 55 miles southeast of San Francisco to spend a happy day at IBM’s research labs at Almaden, where I met all manner of remarkable people and learned about the latest computing developments, but it was the last agenda item of the day that made the greatest impression. So much of an impression that it changed, fundamentally, the way I work.
With an air of mystery, my hosts ushered me into a peculiar room packed with screens, dials and wires in a manner that brought to mind the control room in a nuclear submarine. In the middle of this chaos was placed a perfectly conventional computer monitor and chair.
The monitor displayed three fuzzy grey blobs. I was seated, offered a mouse, and invited to click and drag on one of the blobs. I did. Alarming grinding sounds vibrated through a nearby wall.
The blob stuttered to the new position.
It was then explained to me what I had accomplished. Next door was a scanning tunnelling microscope. When I clicked and dragged, this considerable piece of machinery reached down at my command, plucked an atom from a copper surface and repositioned it.
Not a molecule. Not a group of atoms. One single atom.
I was invited to try again. And again. “What happens if I place one on top of another?” I asked.
This elicited laughter. “We don’t know! We’re doing science! Try it and see!”
PLAYING LEGO WITH ATOMS
In 1990 scientists at this facility had captured world headlines by writing ‘IBM’ by manipulating atoms and publishing the images.
Back then it had taken twenty two hours of solid work to coax 35 Xenon atoms into position to form three letters, and that achievement had come off the back of five years of pioneering research in scanning tunning microscopy. Now it was a party trick to wow visitors like me.
It worked. It left me with a profound and strange feeling. Playing Lego with atoms felt surreal. Omnipotent. God-like.
SO YOU THINK YOU ARE A FUTURIST?
That same day I was privileged to have a conversation with IBM’s head of science at the lab – Spike Narayan, if memory serves – about the chips I could expect to see in the near future, and he gently chided me that I wasn’t looking far enough out. Asking about 45-nanometre circuitry was too short-term when his scientists were already working generations ahead of that, on circuits that were only a few atoms wide.
Nor were they stopping there. They were working on ways to store and manipulate information on parts of atoms, indeed by using the spin of electrons within atoms!
I immediately responded with questions and objections that I hoped were intelligent, such as how were they going to resolve all the weird quantum effects when they got to that scale? To which he explained some of the approaches before shrugging and smiling and saying that frankly, he didn't know all the answers, but he was perfectly confident his people would find them. You could look in his eyes and see he meant it. I recalibrated my understanding of what was coming.
Afterwards, the demonstration and the conversation had a second, longer lasting effect: they made me reflect on just how easy it was to ‘aim short’ when trying to understand the future, and this led me to re-think my methods.
I still meet with technology builders and product makers, but from then until now, my go-to strategy has been speaking directly with scientists whenever the opportunity presents itself. Besides, I like them, and I like hanging out with them. Scientists generally dedicate their lives to trying to make the world a better place, and often for little reward. They are passionate, honest and forthright.
In short, they care. I cannot think of a better type to spend time with. Synergies!
CLOSING THE LOOP WITH A QUANTUM COMPUTER
Fast forward, and in another research lab on the other side of the country, another great computer scientist closed the loop for me. The place was MIT’s Lincoln Lab quantum computing facility. The scientist was Professor William Oliver.
And the moment occured in late September 2018 when, standing in front of one of those jaw-dropping golden chandeliers of nested plates and liquid-helium filled tubes to keep qubits cool and stable, he dropped a quantum computer into my palm. I hefted it, stared at it a long time, and laughed.
Thirteen years after IBM told me we would build computer architecture on an atomic scale and I was holding one.