IBM researchers store one bit of magnetic information in just 12 atoms

IBM Research - Almaden physicist Andreas Heinrich explains the industry-wide need to examine the future of storage at the atomic scale and how he and his teammates started with 1 atom and a scanning tunneling microscope and eventually succeeded in storing one bit of magnetic information reliably in 12 atoms.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• ibm
• research
• almaden
• magnetic
• data
• storage
• bit
• byte
• atomic
• scale
• memory
• scanning
• tunneling
• microscope
• nanotechnology

[SquareCrystal]

great so it says today hard drives need 1 million atoms to store a single bit

which means 1 bit needs 1000000 atoms. so now think if someone has a regular 1 TB hard drive which is equal to 8796093022208 bit if this comes out we can easily store 1 TB data within 8796093 atoms. it's 1 million time smaller than current versions. omg.

[jasleil]

Came here from SixtySymbols.

[dmhudson91]

@roybalcwwu Hahahaha. Except when things get that big we'll have USB 15.0 which will have 100 TB/s or more operating speeds ;P

[labobo]

interesting research, yes but i want the tech in my computer now so what's the holdup ?

To a consumer this research is useless due to the needed low temperature, etc.. so what did you learn that will be useful to a consumer ?

[CassandraVanHout]

Today's bits are the future's floppy disks :o

[roybalcwwu]

Oh crap a virus infected my computer and bricked the OS. Guess I'll need to reformat it.

Formatting... ETA: 57 Years, 28 days, 7 hours, 33 minutes, 55 seconds remaining...

Damn. Shoulda went with a solid state yottabyte drive :-/

[paiwanhan]

so... how would you read from 12 atoms? and how can you scale down that darn tunnelling microscope?

[mindauggas]

I like how they present this a useful, pragmatic, innovation or achievement. Even though its purely symbolic ... it's a show of to possible investors, competitors.

[Raelsatu]

@Winstonsicle Yottabyte...gonna take a little while to reach that threshold. Of course storage technology has advanced at an exponential rate since its creation, but still. We'll definitely make it there within this generation, eventually we'll be able to store "infinite" data. That+___core systems=simulate other universes, etc. ;}

[HWGuyEG]

IBM Model M keyboard, my favourite.