View of a holmium atom.
Credit: IBM Research/Almaden
In the quest to shrink data storage down into tinier and tinier forms, scientists have scored a very, very small triumph.
They did it by creating what’s essentially an incredibly diminutive magnet: It’s just one atom in size, and while it’s not going to be holding birthday cards up on your refrigerator anytime soon, it can do something else: store a data point.
Described in the journal Nature, the experiment involved atoms of a rare earth element called holmium. Physicists working at an IBM research facility in California found that when the holmium atoms were placed on a special surface made of magnesium oxide, they naturally oriented themselves with a magnetic north and south pole—just like regular magnets have—pointing either straight up or down, and remained that way in a stable condition. What’s more, they could make the atoms flip by giving them a zap with a scanning tunneling microscope that has a needle with a tip just one atom wide.
The […]
This reminds me of an old science fiction story called “Mesge fnd in a libry”. There was a library in which all of the knowledge of man was stored on “notched photons”. Everything was fine until someone lost the index ( or nowdays, maybe the password ).
Remarkable achievement!