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| Image: IBM |
IBM researchers have found a way to put a single bit of data on a 12-atom surface, creating the world’s smallest magnetic storage device.
It’s a breakthrough that’s not likely to make its way into hard drives or memory sticks for decades, but it gives us a hint at how much road lies ahead for magnetic storage devices.
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| Courtesy of IBM |
Until now, physicists really didn’t know how small they could take magnetic storage before the laws of quantum mechanics would take over, making it impossible to reliably store data. String together 8 atoms, for example, and you simply can’t get a stable magnetic state, says Andreas Heinrich, the IBM researcher behind the discovery. “The system will just spontaneously hop from one of those states to another state in a timescale that is too fast for us to claim anything like a data storage [demonstration]. It might be switching 1,000 times per second.”
In this video 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.
The full report is available from IBM here.
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