Some artists use paint and brushes, and others use computers to make their masterpieces. But does anyone know that iron on copper molecules can make a wonderful picture?

At IBM, artists inadvertently created art when they were attempting to confine electrons in an effort to observe “quantum chaos.” The new art form was created because the electrons escaped.

At the IBM Almaden Research Center, the artist used a scanning tunnel microscope, STM, to create the images.

With the discovery of STM’s ability to create image variations in the density distribution of surface state electrons, an idea was introduced not only to have complete control over the atomic landscape, but also to control the electronic landscape.

The artists created various corrals of iron atoms and the images can be found at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/gallery.html.

The corrals are created by positioning the electrons into a desired shape. The shapes that are available for viewing are the quantum corral, a circular corral, the rectangular corral and the stadium corral.

The artists make a nice picture, but they are hoping to observe quantum chaos.

What is quantum chaos? Quantum chaos is the study of the quantum mechanics of classically chaotic systems. A broad description of quantum mechanics is the study of the behavior and characteristics of atoms, molecules and nuclei.

The corrals are a new method for confining electrons to artificial structures at the nanometer length scale. Barriers built from iron confined surface state electrons on copper. The tip of a low temperature scanning tunnel microscope created the barriers of iron.

According to the description of the corrals provided by IBM, a circular corral of radius 71.3 Angstrom was constructed in this way out of 48 iron atoms.

Hardware used to create the pictures created by the STM is expensive machinery, from an IBM RISC System/6000 Model 390 workstation, which delivers the latest technology in PowerPC architecture and symmetric multiprocessing, to an SGI Onyx/Reality Engine2 workstation.

In order to process such pictures, the software used must be integrated into the machinery which gathers the technical data. The IBM Visualization Data Explorer (Data Explorer or simply DX) was the main program used.

DX is a general-purpose software package for data visualization and analysis. It utilizes a data-flow driven client-server execution model and provides a graphical program editor that allows the user to create a visualization using a point and click interface.

— Information for this article was found in the website at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/gallery.html.