Wild Cobra
03-09-2017, 07:45 PM
ElNono may like this.
From Nature:
Current commercial bits comprise around 1 million atoms. But in experiments physicists have radically shrunk the number of atoms needed to store 1 bit — moving from 12 atoms in 2012 to now just one. Natterer and his team used atoms of holmium, a rare-earth metal, sitting on a sheet of magnesium oxide, at a temperature below 5 kelvin.
link: Magnetic hard drives go atomic (http://www.nature.com/news/magnetic-hard-drives-go-atomic-1.21599)
Far from a commercial viable product at 5 K degrees, but farther scientific advances could change that.
An accompanying article:
Even more impressively, they show that
the atom’s magnetic state can be written and
read using a scanning tunnelling microscope.
The authors first apply a high voltage (above
about 150 millivolts) to the microscope tip to
flip the atom’s spin — this is the writing pro-
cess. Because the tip is magnetic, electrical
conductance through the probed atom varies
depending on the direction of the atom’s spin
with respect to the magnetization of the tip.
The authors then read the atom’s magnetic
state by measuring this conductance. They
show that if low voltages (below about 75 mV)
are used, the magnetic state can be stable for
many hours.
link: Single Atom Data Storage (http://www.nature.com/articles/543189a.epdf)
I don't know if either of these articles are paywalled or not, because I have my system to log in to my subscriptions.
Hard to get more dense data storage than this, until we do it in 3D instead of 2D.
From Nature:
Current commercial bits comprise around 1 million atoms. But in experiments physicists have radically shrunk the number of atoms needed to store 1 bit — moving from 12 atoms in 2012 to now just one. Natterer and his team used atoms of holmium, a rare-earth metal, sitting on a sheet of magnesium oxide, at a temperature below 5 kelvin.
link: Magnetic hard drives go atomic (http://www.nature.com/news/magnetic-hard-drives-go-atomic-1.21599)
Far from a commercial viable product at 5 K degrees, but farther scientific advances could change that.
An accompanying article:
Even more impressively, they show that
the atom’s magnetic state can be written and
read using a scanning tunnelling microscope.
The authors first apply a high voltage (above
about 150 millivolts) to the microscope tip to
flip the atom’s spin — this is the writing pro-
cess. Because the tip is magnetic, electrical
conductance through the probed atom varies
depending on the direction of the atom’s spin
with respect to the magnetization of the tip.
The authors then read the atom’s magnetic
state by measuring this conductance. They
show that if low voltages (below about 75 mV)
are used, the magnetic state can be stable for
many hours.
link: Single Atom Data Storage (http://www.nature.com/articles/543189a.epdf)
I don't know if either of these articles are paywalled or not, because I have my system to log in to my subscriptions.
Hard to get more dense data storage than this, until we do it in 3D instead of 2D.