Translated material
The world's smallest cartoon
Specialists from IBM “drew” the world’s smallest cartoon [1], which has already collected more than a million views and was included in the Guinness Book of Records. All the frames of the small video, just over a minute long, were created from individual molecules of carbon monoxide CO (they were apparently called atoms “for simplicity”), which were moved along a copper-111 substrate using a scanning tunneling microscope. By the way, the STM itself was also developed by specialists from the IBM Zurich laboratory: in 1986, the German Gerd Biening and the Swiss Heinrich Rohrer received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the STM.
As a matter of fact, the IBM inscription, laid out from 35 atoms, was included in the Guinness Book of Records at about the same time as the smallest inscription in the world.
The cartoon begins with a grouping of only 12 atoms, and this is not accidental [2]. The fact is that last year IBM created a working memory cell (bit) from only a dozen atoms (modern cells consist of approximately a million atoms). It was to commemorate this event that the cartoon “The Boy and His Atom” was created.