> a single atom of the element holmium carefully placed on a surface of magnesium oxide. A special-purpose microscope uses a tiny amount of electrical current to flip the atom's orientation one way or the other, corresponding to writing a 1 or 0. The researchers then read the data by measuring the atom's electromagnetic properties.
I'm not sure I could have recalled the existence of the element holmium, I've never heard or read much about it. I looked it up, and found the likely reason it was used for this research:
"Holmium has the highest magnetic permeability of any element and therefore is used for the polepieces of the strongest static magnets." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmium
I don't know if we'll see practical atomic storage or if more than one bit per atom is physically possible, but in theory there's enough space in an atom to hold millions of bits. But I think you have to get to black hole density... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound
Just note that in practice nobody wants to keep their data storing atoms frozen near absolute zero, but rather prefer to have them at temperature close to 300 K.
However to store 1 bit of information at given temperature the energy difference between state corresponding to 0 and state corresponding to 1 has to be not less than something of order kT ≈ 0.02, otherwise the information would be quickly erased by thermal motion. But if we take maximum energy gap at atom that might be used for storing information to be upper bounded by atom's ionization energy [1], it turns out that it can't be larger than something of order 10 eV. So it doesn't seem to be possible to store more than hundreds or thousands of bits per atom at room temperature.
> I don't know if we'll see practical atomic storage or if more than one bit per atom is physically possible, but in theory there's enough space in an atom to hold millions of bits.
Things like this were partially why I got interested in electrical engineering & physics. Sadly, 15 years later, my career deviated to financial software, but I still find articles & progressions like these fascinating.
Storage medium is just part of the equation. The other important and hard part is the mechanism that is required to read and write data to that medium. Would you use a CD as a storage medium when the CD reader/writer is size of a washing machine?
> Would you use a CD as a storage medium when the CD reader/writer is size of a washing machine?
Yes, according to history, if that's all anyone had. :)
IBM's project might be the ENIAC of molecular storage devices. Only time will tell. Keep in mind your example doesn't go far enough to match past history, we used to actually have much worse than 600MB / washing machine. We used to have 100 words / warehouse.
"By the end of its operation in 1955, ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It weighed more than 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 2.4m × 0.9m × 30m (8 × 3 × 100 feet) in size, occupied 167m2 (1800 ft2) and consumed 150 kW of electricity."
"In 1953, a 100-word magnetic-core memory built by the Burroughs Corporation was added to ENIAC"
* EDIT: It'd be more fair to use punch cards as ENIAC's storage mechanism to compare against, and punch cards held a lot more than 100 words. Anyway, still, crazy by today's standards, right?
I think it's a good unit of comparison. Virtually everyone has listened to a song to completion, and a very large number of people have done so in the past 24 hours, or even hour. It's also much easier to quantify the length of a song. Whereas with books: well, it's been a couple months at least since I've finished a new book. And number of pages in a book is not as meaningful to the human experience as amount of time. And the amount of time spent on a book -- i.e. minute per page -- greatly varies per human.
Sure, according to who you ask, a 3-minute Justin Bieber song contains less "data" than a 3-minute Bob Dylan song, but at least the quantifying of time is consistent among different people (um, relatively speaking).
And sure, 26 million songs is still as hard to comprehend as 26 million books. But again, more people can quantify how much of their life a song takes because most people have more recently consumed a song's worth of information.
The variance between data storage for song (e.g. length, kbps) is not meaningfully different enough in terms of order of magnitude.
why? for those who know how big a song is, you can easily translate. for those who have no idea but roughly know how many songs their music players can hold it is a far more meaningful measure than units of 'bit'
The atoms are manipulated by a scanning tunneling microscope [1], which allows you to both image and manipulate single atoms, as shown in the movie "A Boy and His Atom" [2], also made by IBM. You can make sure there's only one by just taking an image at a resolution high enough to see single atoms.
This is fundamentally a scanning technique. A very sharp tip, down to a few atoms at the point, sometimes capped with a single carbon nanotube, is scanned across the surface of whatever sample you have, which for a measurement like this, must be almost atomically flat. A bias is applied between the sample and the tip, and quantum tunnelling can allow for electrons to move between the sample and the tip. This current can then be measured, and correlated with sample height or electronic properties of the sample. If you scanning step size is less than that of the size of an atom, you can then image single atoms by detecting the change in current due to a different species of atom, or due to the change in height between your flat surface and tip when an atom is sticking out of the top of the surface.
To manipulate the atoms, the tip is moved close enough to an adatom that it begins to form a weak bond with the tip. The tip then can move and essentially drag the adatom with it to wherever the researchers want. [3]
As a child (showing my age here) I remember getting a 20MB HDD for our desktop machine (might have been an Olivetti with a 286 CPU, I don't remember). At the time, that seemed an incredible amount of storage - "how will I ever fill that", I thought!
Couple of years ago a japanese team used an iodine atom to compute a fourier transform. The computation was faster than a computer but the ETL was super slow.
IBM has been pushing stuff around with a tunneling microscope for decades.
It's cool but the press should report the transfer rate.
This website is a piece of shit. It autostarts a second video off screen even after I swatted the first one that popped on the right, covering the text of the article.
I was a team lead for an IBM operations team for 6 months in 2016. Aside from my first two days, I worked from home the entire duration of the role, based in Sydney. Most of my staff were in China, with handoff to the next shift in Europe (who were all remote staff as well).
[+] [-] dahart|9 years ago|reply
I'm not sure I could have recalled the existence of the element holmium, I've never heard or read much about it. I looked it up, and found the likely reason it was used for this research:
"Holmium has the highest magnetic permeability of any element and therefore is used for the polepieces of the strongest static magnets." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmium
I don't know if we'll see practical atomic storage or if more than one bit per atom is physically possible, but in theory there's enough space in an atom to hold millions of bits. But I think you have to get to black hole density... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound
[+] [-] inlineint|9 years ago|reply
However to store 1 bit of information at given temperature the energy difference between state corresponding to 0 and state corresponding to 1 has to be not less than something of order kT ≈ 0.02, otherwise the information would be quickly erased by thermal motion. But if we take maximum energy gap at atom that might be used for storing information to be upper bounded by atom's ionization energy [1], it turns out that it can't be larger than something of order 10 eV. So it doesn't seem to be possible to store more than hundreds or thousands of bits per atom at room temperature.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionization_energies_of_the_ele...
[+] [-] jacquesm|9 years ago|reply
What will you encode the bits with?
[+] [-] mgalka|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hermitdev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnarbarian|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kattywumpus|9 years ago|reply
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2002/080702/Ultimate_memory_de...
[+] [-] ankurdhama|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahart|9 years ago|reply
Yes, according to history, if that's all anyone had. :)
IBM's project might be the ENIAC of molecular storage devices. Only time will tell. Keep in mind your example doesn't go far enough to match past history, we used to actually have much worse than 600MB / washing machine. We used to have 100 words / warehouse.
"By the end of its operation in 1955, ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It weighed more than 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 2.4m × 0.9m × 30m (8 × 3 × 100 feet) in size, occupied 167m2 (1800 ft2) and consumed 150 kW of electricity."
"In 1953, a 100-word magnetic-core memory built by the Burroughs Corporation was added to ENIAC"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
* EDIT: It'd be more fair to use punch cards as ENIAC's storage mechanism to compare against, and punch cards held a lot more than 100 words. Anyway, still, crazy by today's standards, right?
[+] [-] visarga|9 years ago|reply
The smart thing to do nowadays is to locate processing circuitry with the memory in order to reduce transport and maximize parallelism.
[+] [-] erikj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikenew|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|9 years ago|reply
Sure, according to who you ask, a 3-minute Justin Bieber song contains less "data" than a 3-minute Bob Dylan song, but at least the quantifying of time is consistent among different people (um, relatively speaking).
And sure, 26 million songs is still as hard to comprehend as 26 million books. But again, more people can quantify how much of their life a song takes because most people have more recently consumed a song's worth of information.
The variance between data storage for song (e.g. length, kbps) is not meaningfully different enough in terms of order of magnitude.
[+] [-] sheeshkebab|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rokhayakebe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfusion|9 years ago|reply
Has anyone looked into that?
[+] [-] marcosdumay|9 years ago|reply
1 - If you do it with a surface, there's commercial tech available for reading it. But you'll still have to develop the entire writing stack.
2 - For a "my info is secure for N times longer than the Universe will take to get into heat death" you'll get a smaller N.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] adrianN|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rampoina|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tcpekin|9 years ago|reply
This is fundamentally a scanning technique. A very sharp tip, down to a few atoms at the point, sometimes capped with a single carbon nanotube, is scanned across the surface of whatever sample you have, which for a measurement like this, must be almost atomically flat. A bias is applied between the sample and the tip, and quantum tunnelling can allow for electrons to move between the sample and the tip. This current can then be measured, and correlated with sample height or electronic properties of the sample. If you scanning step size is less than that of the size of an atom, you can then image single atoms by detecting the change in current due to a different species of atom, or due to the change in height between your flat surface and tip when an atom is sticking out of the top of the surface.
To manipulate the atoms, the tip is moved close enough to an adatom that it begins to form a weak bond with the tip. The tip then can move and essentially drag the adatom with it to wherever the researchers want. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_and_His_Atom
[3] https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/atom-manipulation-sca...
[+] [-] nol13|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sanddancer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanbernstein|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a012|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GordonS|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awinter-py|9 years ago|reply
IBM has been pushing stuff around with a tunneling microscope for decades.
It's cool but the press should report the transfer rate.
[+] [-] michaelmwangi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbrown_|9 years ago|reply
https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_y...
[+] [-] kator|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adtac|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fred_is_fred|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visarga|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickpeterson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinSuttle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blorgle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|9 years ago|reply
News: "A does X."
You: "They don't do Y."
What is the thought process involved in this behavior?
[+] [-] parthdesai|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grangar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|9 years ago|reply
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/bshytzp0on1dfvjdfw4-vq