How to move an atom

Chris Lutz
IBM Research scientist
and atom mover

IBM scientists take you inside the workings of a scanning tunneling microscope and the discoveries they’ve made.


Want to see what an atom really looks like close up; or try to
actually move one? All you’ll need is a two-ton scanning tunneling microscope –
otherwise known as an STM. Not something you can easily buy or use as part of
a personal

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IBM Fellow Chieko Asakawa awarded Medal of Honor

Awarded in Japan's Emperor's name, the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon
is given to outstanding contributors in valuable invention, creation, and
modernization in academic and artistic fields.




IBM Fellow
Chieko Asakawa


The government of Japan awarded the 2013 Medal of Honor with
Purple Ribbon to IBM Fellow Chieko
Asakawa for her outstanding contributions to accessibility research,

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Earth Day Collaboration Aims to Harness the Energy of 2,000 Suns

It would take only two percent of the Sahara Desert’s land area to supply the world’s electricity needs. Unfortunately, current solar technologies on the market today are too expensive and slow to produce, require rare Earth minerals and lack the efficiency to make such massive installations practical. To address this scientists aren't thinking bigger, in fact they are thinking much smaller --

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Research transportation team designs smarter railways simulator

An Open Collaborative Research
project in Zurich is using algorithmic technology to automate train movement
and identify impediments to smooth, timely train travel.




Marco Laumanns
Project Leader, Transportation
& Operations Research


Simulated scenarios have an
obvious advantage over real world environments: When the Law of Unintended
Consequences strikes, nobody gets hurt. Nowhere is this

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Profile of a Scientist: Antje Rey

Photo by Britta Machoy

Who: Antje Rey

Location: IBM Research - Zurich

Nationality: Swiss

Something about me:
In my spare time I create and design jewelry, including rings and earrings from silver.

Focus: Molecular Electronics
“I’m inspired by the science. We are working at the edge of human knowledge, and the potential applications for modern society are boundless -- spanning from devices

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Shining a Light on Functional Oxides

At IBM Research – Zurich, the advanced materials and photonics group collaborate on photonics technology for future computing systems and the teams are currently researching the use of silicon photonics for intra-chip data communication to overcome bandwidth limitations imposed by copper wires. Optical link technology  -- or "CMOS integrated silicon photonics" -- could ultimately enable data

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Mission Impossible? Not for these IBM scientists

IBM scientist Ioannis Koltsidas’ phone rang on the afternoon of February 4. His manager was on the other line.

“Pack your bags, you and Nikolas [Ioannou] need to fly out to the IBM lab in Almaden and build a half-petabyte storage system out of Flash. It's for a demonstration at a critically important meeting on 28 February.”


“But I don’t think that’s ever been done before,” commented a nervous

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