Inside the world’s quietest room

In a hole, on some bedrock a few miles outside central Zurich, there lived a spin-polarised scanning electron microscope. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole: it was a nanotech hole, and that means quiet. And electromagnetically shielded. And vibration-free. And cool.

When you want to carry out experiments at the atomic scale—when you want to pick up a single atom and move it to the other end of a molecule—it requires incredibly exacting equipment. That equipment, though, is worthless without an equally exacting laboratory to put it in. If you’re peering down the (figurative) barrel of a microscope at a single atom, you need to make sure there are absolutely no physical vibrations at all, or you’ll just get a blurry image. Similarly, atoms really don’t like to sit still: you don’t want to spend a few hours setting up a transmission electron microscope (TEM), only to have a temperature fluctuation or EM field imbue the atoms with enough energy to start jumping around on their own accord.

One solution, as you have probably gathered from the introduction to this story, is to build a bunker deep underground, completely from scratch, with every facet of the project simulated, designed, and built with a singular purpose in mind: to block out the outside world entirely. That’s exactly what IBM Research did back in 2011, when it opened the Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center.