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back to article The future of storage is ATOMIC: IBM boffins stash 1 bit on 1 atom

Molecules are so yesterday – IBM boffins at Almaden have cracked atomic storage, magnetising a single atom and storing a bit of data on it. The atom in question was a Holmium atom, a silvery-white metal and a rare earth, lanthanide element. It also has the highest magnetic moment of any naturally occurring material. A Holmium …

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  1. A. Coatsworth Silver badge
    Joke

    "... read by tunnel magnetoresistance, measuring a current passing through the atom using the quantum mechanical spin resonance effect with a single iron atom used as a sensor"

    Yeeeah... I know Scotty used that explanation at some point or other. It didn't sound believable back then, either.

    15 0 Reply
  2. Jan 0 Silver badge

    Still a long way off the "Nudged Quantum"*

    *From one if the few interesting Asimov Stories. (He's ok as long as he doesn't have to do characterisation).

    4 2 Reply
    1. Neil Barnes Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Still a long way off the "Nudged Quantum"*

      Perhaps you mean 'ms fnd in a lbry' by Hal Draper?

      Let's hear it for nudged quanta!

      3 0 Reply
  3. sorry, what?
    Unhappy

    What we need...

    Is high density storage using some really abundant material, not a rare earth one. Otherwise China (who was it who said "I like China"? He knew a lot about trucks) may be holding all the dice...

    1 4 Reply
    1. David Knapman
      Reply Icon

      Re: What we need...

      You might like to read up on Rare Earths before making comments like this - E.g. from Wikipedia "Despite their name, rare earth elements are – with the exception of the radioactive promethium – relatively plentiful in Earth's crust"

      13 0 Reply

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. sorry, what?
        Reply Icon
        Coat

        Re: What we need...

        @Mr. Knapman, Ahem! I'm not precious. I'll stand corrected. Ironic name. Periodically confusing people.

        Still, it would be nice to be able to use silicon, or something else that is really abundant, for this job. Even better if the extraction and purification were clean and cheap.

        3 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What we need...

      Rare earths aren't really all that rare (in general, I don't specifically know about Holmium). They're often found as trace amounts in other mineral deposits (e.g. Titanium oxide). They're just a bugger to purify and isolate from the bulk material and each other, and most of the processes which do so are messy and environmentally damaging. That's why China has so much of the supply - no-one else wants the job.

      Occasionally the Chinese government tries to push prices up. If they go too far the market becomes lucrative enough for processing to start up again in the west, prices come back down again and China no longer has a monopoly. It's happened before with various metals, it'll probably happen again, and it's probably nothing to worry about - it's one case where free markets can be self-correcting.

      9 0 Reply
    3. CraPo
      Reply Icon

      Re: What we need...

      Wikipedia says,

      "This makes it the 56th most abundant element in the earth's crust." although "Holmium is rare for a lanthanide".

      and

      "The main mining areas are China, United States, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka, and Australia with reserves of holmium estimated as 400,000 tonnes"

      3 0 Reply
    4. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: What we need...

      Shame Tim Worstall doesn't post here any more. I'm sure, as someone who deals with the metals market, he would have an interesting insight on this.

      7 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "It doesn't get any smaller than a single atom."

    Depends on the size of the atom.

    << Hydrogen waving at Holmium shouting "Lose some atomic mass fat boy" >>

    15 0 Reply
  5. Electron Shepherd
    Thumb Up

    Isn't he at least two levels out?

    "It doesn't get any smaller than a single atom"

    Well, apart from all the protons and neutrons that make up an atom, and all the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons...

    Store a bit on a quark and then I'll be impressed! I'm sure our El Reg correspondent could find strange but charming way to spin that announcement...

    But seriously - top boffiny! Drinks all round!

    24 0 Reply
    1. Aladdin Sane
      Reply Icon
      Pint

      Re: Isn't he at least two levels out?

      Superb punnery, have a ----->

      3 0 Reply
    2. Chz
      Reply Icon

      Re: Isn't he at least two levels out?

      I did think while I was reading it that storing ONE measly bit on an atom was just laziness. Maybe if it's hydrogen. I'm sure that differing levels of electron excitation would allow storing several bits per atom if they tried harder. :)

      2 0 Reply
      1. Swarthy
        Reply Icon

        Re: Isn't he at least two levels out?

        I was thinking they could record bits in the spin of individual electrons. Probably use one of the noble gasses.

        0 0 Reply
  6. Mage Silver badge

    Bubble memory

    Bubble memory actually made it as a real (though niche) product. Maybe it could be re-born at much higher capacity (petabytes?)

    This is wonderful research. It may or may not ever be in a real product.

    20 years after Bubble memory (static wafer), the MO spinning discs were wonderful.

    The holographic storage that was supposed to replace it, never really left the lab, Flash grew and replaced both static RAM with a coin cell and smaller HDD.

    Now we are promised various kinds of "better than flash" solid state memory from IBM, Intel, HP etc, that always seem 6 months away.

    So will it be a spinning disk type device or a card like device?

    My SF stories devices obviously must have Holmium based storage on their sapphire substrate wafer scale integration "circuit" boards.

    2 0 Reply
  7. GBE

    Not quite ready to replace the flash in your phone

    The requirement for an STM and a throughput probably measured in bits/day are still issues that need to be resolved. :)

    It's still good to see IBM doing stuff like this!

    7 0 Reply
    1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Not quite ready to replace the flash in your phone

      Yes, they do like their research with intricate types of microscope, after spelling out IBM in atoms in 1990.

      Big bullies,picking on something so much smaller than themselves!

      5 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not quite ready to replace the flash in your phone

        To be fair Peter, IBM also invented the scanning, tunnelling electron microscope that makes this sort of work possible. IBM R&D is a very good R&D organisation.

        It just isn't in the public imagination like the "R&D" from the company that makes rounded phone corners.

        11 0 Reply
  8. Pirate Dave Silver badge
    Pirate

    "This means if a device using such storage tech could be built, it would be 10,000 times denser than today's disk drives and SSDs."

    I got to checking - where are we now compared to earlier times?

    Using the chart at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/Full_History_Disk_Areal_Density_Trend.png/220px-Full_History_Disk_Areal_Density_Trend.png

    (which I think originally came from IBM).

    In 1980, areal density was around .01 Gig/sq in.

    100 times that is 1 Gig/sq in, which we hit in the mid 90's.

    1000 times the 1980 density is 10 Gig/sq in, which we hit around 2000.

    10,000 times the 1980 density is 100 Gig/sq in, which we hit in the mid 2000's.

    100,000 times the 1980 areal density is 1 Tb/sq in, which I think we hit in 2014.

    (and if I missed a zero in all of that, feel free to correct me.)

    So we increased areal density 100,000 times between 1980 and today, but IBM is predicting that even at single-atom-storage scale, we've only got a 10,000 times increase left before we max out from physical properties. Sobering.

    9 0 Reply
    1. xeroks
      Reply Icon

      Don't worry about it too much. I'm pretty sure we can go well beyond a single bit per atom. and there's always the option of 3Ding it.

      3 1 Reply
      1. Dwarf
        Reply Icon

        Don't worry about it too much. I'm pretty sure we can go well beyond a single bit per atom. and there's always the option of 3Ding it.

        Atoms already arrange themselves in 3D.

        0 1 Reply
        1. Neil Barnes Silver badge
          Reply Icon
          Coat

          <cough>graphene</cough>

          5 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      "In 1980, areal density was around .01 Gig/sq in."

      In the late 1960s the state of the art 8MB exchangeable disks were becoming commonplace. Assuming they had 5 platters with single sided heads - that gives a density in the order of 0.006 MB/sq in. That doesn't exclude the unused inner circle of the surface.

      4 0 Reply
  9. Sleep deprived
    Holmes

    1,0000 times denser

    Is this one thousand with an extra 0, or ten thousands with a misplaced comma? Or just 1 in plain IS?

    1 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 1,0000 times denser

      Never seen it look like that 'efore. My article here on Earth has it listed as 10,000 not in an alternate form.

      Still, think about that, 10K times the storage capacity! Let's say this becomes a viable storage technology, and it can actually reach the scale and all... that would be a 2.5PB(PetaBytes) "micro" SD card if we use the new 256GB capacity as a starting value.

      I am looking forward to purchasing one of these cards in the future and putting some stuff on it. Yes, yes. Then I will buy a second and turn it into a mighty boot device for my Raspberry Pi 12! Huzzah!

      1 0 Reply
  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Further improvement

    So if we combine a Holmium drive with Helium, do we get an ever denser hard drive?

    1 0 Reply
  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It operates under vacuum because what???

    Don’t know about you, but I’ve always found it really hard to cool something down to liquid He temp in atmospheric pressure…. duh!

    0 0 Reply
  12. Kaltern

    This will take decades of research, and grants from the guvermint to develop into something that more people can make money from, once the patent has been signed, sealed and delivered.

    Progress huh.

    0 0 Reply
  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This...

    ...and the current President of America needs adult supervision to sharpen his crayons.

    2 0 Reply
  14. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
    Trollface

    Sad times

    Until this gets built, I'll carry my 35 million iTunes songs on 1 TB SD cards stacked in a tray like little punch cards. Yeah, those cards are a bit pricey but it's not bad compared to the cost of 35 million iTunes downloads.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Sad times

      Definitely less expensive to pay $10/month for Apple Music for the rest of your life to have access to those 35 million songs, even if "the rest of your life" lasted until the heat death of the universe.

      0 1 Reply

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