Breakthrough demonstrates how small storage could become,Hardware,Storage ,IBM,Storage,cloud computing
BOFFINS AT IBM claim to have developed a technique to store and retrieve data from a single atom. In comparison, current magnetic hard-disk drives require around 100,000 atoms to store a single ‘bit’, while current best-effort research has achieved storage on between three and 12 atoms.
The researchers used Holmium (Ho) atoms on a bed of magnesium oxide. Holmium is a rare earth element and part of the lanthanide series of metallic chemical elements. Holmium on magnesium oxide has a property called ‘magnetic bistability’, which is to say it can have two stable magnetic states.
« To demonstrate independent reading and writing, we built an atomic-scale structure with two Holmium bits, to which we write the four possible states and which we read out both magneto-resistively and remotely by electron spin resonance, » claim the researchers in their paper.
« The high magnetic stability combined with electrical reading and writing shows that single-atom magnetic memory is indeed possible.
