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Magnetic Hard Drives Go Atomic

posted by on Saturday March 11 2017, @03:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the probably-not-explosive dept.

"exec" writes:

Physicists demonstrate the first single-atom magnetic storage.

Current commercial bits comprise around 1 million atoms. But in experiments physicists have radically shrunk the number of atoms needed to store 1 bit — moving from 12 atoms in 2012 to now just one. Natterer and his team used atoms of holmium, a rare-earth metal, sitting on a sheet of magnesium oxide, at a temperature below 5 kelvin.

Holmium is particularly suitable for single-atom storage because it has many unpaired electrons that create a strong magnetic field, and they sit in an orbit close to the atom's centre where they are shielded from the environment. This gives holmium both a large and stable field, says Natterer. But the shielding has a drawback: it makes the holmium notoriously difficult to interact with. And until now, many physicists doubted whether it was possible to reliably determine the atom's state.

To write the data onto a single holmium atom, the team used a pulse of electric current from the magnetized tip of scanning tunnelling microscope, which could flip the orientation of the atom's field between a 0 or 1. In tests the magnets proved stable, each retaining their data for several hours, with the team never seeing one flip unintentionally. They used the same microscope to read out the bit — with different flows of current revealing the atom's magnetic state.

-- submitted from IRC

[Ed's note: removed the reference/footnote that was mangling the year - FP]

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Saturday March 11 2017, @04:33PM (2 children)

    by Gaaark (41) on Saturday March 11 2017, @04:33PM (#477777) Journal

    moving from 12 atoms in 20122 to now just one.

    Shit, the Doctor and i HAVE been gone for a long time: it's now 20122?!?!

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Saturday March 11 2017, @09:16PM

    by Bot (3902) on Saturday March 11 2017, @09:16PM (#477858) Journal

    Nope it is a faulty keyboard.
    Same error happening with your comment ID, apparently.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday March 11 2017, @11:21PM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Saturday March 11 2017, @11:21PM (#477878) Homepage
    It was a superscript pointing to a footnote in the original. Deleted as it's annotation rather than body text. Thanks for reporting it in such a humorous way!
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