IBM Actually Stored Data on a Single Atom

IBM Has Figured out How to Store Data on a Single Atom
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In a breakthrough verging on the outer limits of Newtonian physics, IBM researchers have successfully stored a bit of data on the smallest unit of common matter– a single atom– paving the way for radically miniaturized computing.

It may become possible to store the entire iTunes catalogue of 35 million songs on a drive the size of a credit card.

Current hard disk drives require around 100,000 atoms to store a single bit of data using traditional methods. The new IBM system, on the other hand, can yield storage devices that are 1,000 times denser, meaning that computers may one day become “radically smaller and more powerful”, IBM said in its press release. Using similar techniques, the researchers say, it may become possible to store the entire iTunes catalogue of 35 million songs on a drive the size of a credit card.

Cramming a bit of data into an atom is no mean feat. A bit is a unit of information that can be read as either a 1 or a 0. Everything ranging from your emails to the latest iOS is composed of a series of 1s and 0s.

Roughly, what the researchers, working out of IBM’s Silicon Valley-based Almaden lab, did to read and write data onto a single Holmium atom, was find a way to magnetize it and use its two magnetic poles (analogous to the north and south poles on a compass) to represent 1s and 0s.

In a study published yesterday in the scientific journal Nature, the physicists detailed their experiments in which they placed a single Holmium (Ho) atom on a bed of magnesium oxide (MgO) and kept it at a temperature of 5 Kelvin. This system kept the Holmium atom’s magnetic poles stable.

Then, using a scanning tunneling microscope (an IBM invention that won the Nobel Prize for Physics back in the ‘80s), the team ran a tiny electrical current through the atom, causing it to switch to one of its two magnetic states. By determining the magnetic orientation of the atom, the researchers were able to “read” it and figure out whether it corresponded to a 1 or a 0.

And voila: the researchers essentially encoded a bit of data onto a single Holmium atom, suggesting “a path toward data storage at the atomic limit”. Moreover, the Holmium atoms were able to “independently retain their magnetic information over many hours,” as they write in the study.

As you can imagine, this is far from a commercially viable technique and it could be decades before atomic-level computing is commercialized, says IBM researcher Christopher Lutz.

“This work is not product development, but rather it is basic research intended to develop tools and understanding of what happens as we miniaturize devices down toward the ultimate limit of individual atom,” Lutz said to CNET. “We are starting at individual atoms, and building up from there to invent new information technologies.”

But Big Blue has taken us another tiny step toward smaller, yet incredibly powerful, computers and smartphones.

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