(Image source: Max Planck Institute / Discovery News)
BY STEVEN SPARKMAN
ANCHOR MEGAN MURPHY
They’ve found the answer, and it isn’t 42. Computer scientists have long wondered just how small data storage devices could eventually get before running into the laws of quantum mechanics. Now they know.
“Think your [solid state drive] is the bomb because it can stash away 128GB of data on something so svelte? The future is far more promising, as researchers at IBM managed to stash and retrieve digital 1s and 0s from an array of a mere 12 atoms.”
That’s right -- 12 atoms to store a bit of data. For comparison, the standard right now is about a million atoms per bit. They built the little bits atom by atom using a scanning tunneling microscope. This video from IBM explains how it works.
“The tip of the scanning tunneling microscope can also be used to switch the magnetic information on this bit from a 0 to a 1 or from a 1 to a 0. Now we’re zooming out from a single bit to eight bits, which makes one byte...”
Their byte took up 96 atoms. A byte is enough storage to hold the information of a single keystroke on your keyboard, like a letter or a number.
Five bytes were enough for them to encode the IBM slogan “Think.” That’s 480 atoms. (Image source: IBM)
If this technology were ever mass-produced, what would that mean for your storage devices? An analyst tells MSNBC’s Future of Technology blog...
“The finding could lead to terabyte hard drives the size of a pinhead or thumb drives that hold every movie you've ever seen...”
Of course, this breakthrough technology is decades away from your smartphone. Discovery News explains why we’ll be waiting on 12-atom bits for a while.
“First, this hard drive was built atom-by-atom ... an impractical and slow method for manufacturing. Secondly, the storage of the information -- the magnetic state -- is only stable at very cold temperatures, about 5 degrees above absolute zero.”
The researchers did say the same effect could be achieved at room temperature by using 150 atoms instead of 12 -- still tiny compared to modern storage.
