Tiny Hard Drive Uses Single Atoms to Store Data
Tiny Hard Drive Uses Single Atoms to Store Data
It packs hundreds of time more information per square
inch than best currently available technologies, study says
By DANIELA HERNANDEZ July 18, 2016 11:00 a.m. ET
By manipulating the interactions between individual
atoms, scientists report they have created a device that can pack hundreds of
times more information per square inch than the best currently available
data-storage technologies.
The working prototype is part of a decades-long attempt
to shrink electronics down to the atomic level, a feat scientists believe would
allow them to store information much more efficiently, in less space and more
cheaply. By comparison, tech companies today build warehouse-sized data centers
to store the billions of photos, videos and posts consumers upload to the
internet daily. Corporations including International Business Machines Corp.
and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. also have explored research to reduce such
space needs.
The so-called atomic-scale memory, described in a paper
published on Monday in the scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology, can hold
one kilobyte, the equivalent of roughly a paragraph of text.
It may not sound “very impressive,” said Franz Himpsel, a
professor emeritus of physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who
wasn’t involved in the study. But “I would call it a breakthrough.”
Most previous attempts at encoding information with
atoms, including his own, managed roughly one byte, Dr. Himpsel said. And data
could be stored only once. To store new information, the “disk” had to be
re-formatted, like CD-Rs popular in the ’90s.
With the new device, “we can rewrite it as often as we
like,” said Sander Otte, an experimental physicist at Delft University of
Technology in the Netherlands and the lead author on the new paper.
The researchers first stored a portion of Charles
Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” on the device. They then replaced that with
160 words from a 1959 lecture by physicist Richard Feynman in which he imagined
a world powered by devices running on atomic-scale memory.
To build their prototype, the scientists peppered a flat
copper bed with about 60,000 chlorine atoms scattered at random, purposely
leaving roughly 8,000 empty spaces among them. A mapping algorithm guided the
tiny, copper-coated tip of a high-tech microscope to gently pull each chlorine
atom to a predetermined location, creating a precise arrangement of atoms and
neighboring “holes.”
The team also crafted a language for their device. The
stored information is encoded in the patterns of holes between atoms. The
atom-tugging needle reads them as ones and zeros, turning them into regular
binary code.
The researchers marked up the grid with instructions that
cued the software where it should direct the needle to write and read data. For
instance, a three-hole diagonal line marked the end of a file.
“That’s what I really love in this work,” said Elke Scheer,
a nanoscientist at the University of Konstanz in Germany not involved with the
study. “It’s not just physics. It’s also informatics.”
Writing the initial data to the device took about a week,
though the rewriting process takes just a few hours, Dr. Otte said.
“It’s automated, so it’s 10 times faster than previous
examples,” said Christopher Lutz, a staff scientist at IBM Research-Almaden in
San Jose, Calif. Still, “this is very exploratory. It’s important not to see
this one-kilobyte memory result as something that can be taken directly to a
product.”
Reading the stored data is much too slow to have
practical applications soon. Plus, the device is stable for only a few hours at
extremely low temperatures. To be competitive with today’s hard drives, the
memory would have to persist for years and work in warmer temperatures, said
Victor Zhirnov, chief scientist at the Semiconductor Research Corp., a research
consortium based in Durham, N.C.
When Dr. Otte’s team took the memory out of the extremely
low-temperature environment in which it was built and stored, the information
it held was lost. Next, his team will explore other metal surfaces as well as
elements similar to, but heavier than, chlorine, to see if that improves the
device’s stability.
“There’s many combinations to play with,” he said.
Write to Daniela Hernandez at daniela.hernandez@wsj.com
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