Two IBM discoveries add promise for nano-computing

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Imagine cramming 30,000 full-length movies into a gadget the size of an iPod.

Scientists at IBM said on Thursday they had moved closer to such a feat by learning how to steer single atoms in a way that could create building blocks for ultra-tiny storage devices.

Understanding and manipulating the behavior of atoms is critical to harnessing the power of nanotechnology, which deals with particles tens of thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair.

"One of the most basic properties that every atom has is that it behaves like a little magnet," said Cyrus Hirjibehedin, a scientist at International Business Machines Corp.'s (IBM.N) Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.

"If you can keep that magnetic orientation stable over time, then you can use that to store information. That is how your hard drive works," Hirjibehedin said in a telephone interview.

"What we are trying to understand is how this fundamental property works for a single atom."

Hirjibehedin and colleague Andreas Heinrich studied this property -- known as magnetic anisotropy -- in individual iron atoms using a special microscope developed at IBM.

"What we've been able to do is to look at an iron atom on a copper surface and to move that magnetic orientation around," Heinrich said.