Quantum Corral, 2009

Gilded wood; 13” x 12” x 3”  (34 cm x 31 cm x 6 cm)

I made this object by using data from a landmark experiment performed in 1993 by Mike Crommie, Chris Lutz, and Don Eigler at the IBM Almaden Research Center. The researchers prepared a very clean copper surface with a few iron atoms scattered on it and used a scanning tunneling microscope, a device that ‘feels’ a surface with subatomic resolution, to create data that represent the shape of this tiny landscape. This same device was used to push the iron atoms into a neat circle after which the surface was scanned again. The iron atoms show up as peaks and their shared electrons form a circular standing wave inside the circle, termed ‘quantum corral’ by the researchers. This standing wave pattern, whose emergence is analogous to the standing waves inside a musical instrument, was directly detected by scanning the surface. This is a rare example of making quantum mechanical matter waves directly visible. I asked the researchers for their data, which they kindly provided, and wrote software to translate the experimental data into code that could be used to mill the shape out of a piece of wood. The object was then gilded with pure gold.