IBM Happenings: September 2008

The month of September was a month, as usual for IBM, filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. Included was the revelation that IBM scientists had unlocked the secret of the Kondo Effect. The scientists at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California have forged many breakthroughs over the years.

The Almaden center, which is set on 690 acres in the foothills above Silicon Valley, has a rich history of technical inventions including the disk storage drive, the relational database, and a bevy of innovations in nanotechnology and spintronics.

The latest breakthrough from Almaden’s staff of 400 researchers and visiting staff is that they have unlocked the "Secret of the Kondo Effect". If you haven’t heard of the Kondo effect, you are not alone. Scientists around the world have been studying the intriguing phenomenon in fundamental
physics for decades. The Kondo effect is one of the few examples in physics where many particles collectively behave as one object. Clear as mud? For me too, but discovery of how this works represents a major advance in the understanding of some fundamental physical phenomena and it may have a major impact on the development of future nanoscale magnetic devices. What that means is that our mobile phones will have more storage capacity than large computers do. Assuming that Internet bandwidth continues to expand it will mean that a vast amount of the world’s data will be stored in clouds.

Complete index of IBM Happenings