They also used the device to store a similarly sized section of text from Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”.
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Dutch scientists have created the world’s smallest hard disk by developing a new rewritable storage technology capable of writing information atom by atom. According to a Popular Mechanics write-up, that’s enough to “fit the entire Library of Congress on a cube smaller than a dust mite-or the size of George Washington’s pupil on a one dollar bill”.
Using the scanning tunneling microscope, scientists can drag holes around on a copper surface to encode all kinds of information. The new system, while still a bit slow, is a huge improvement in user friendliness. A hole appears in the grid when an atom is missing.
The scientists made use of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in which a sharp needle probes the atoms on a surface one by one.
When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press he changed the world. A blank space followed by a chlorine atom is a 0, while the reverse (a chlorine atom and then a blank space) is a 1. Voila, instant hard drive.
Because each chlorine in atom is surrounded by other chlorine atoms, they remain stable and stationary. That is why this method with holes is much more stable than methods with loose atoms and more suitable for data storage.
“Just stop and think for a moment how far we got as humans that we can now engineer things with this incredible level of precision, and wonder about the possibilities that it may give”, Otte said. Next, the researchers found they could scoot around the chlorine atoms on this grid, sort of like a sliding block puzzle, and thus rearrange where the dark spots on the grid are. Each of these blocks was assigned a marker, constructed from the same types of “holes” as the raster of chlorine atoms. The team said the markers acted like the pixelated square barcodes known as QR codes, and carried details on the precise location of the block on the layer of copper. These markers can also indicate when a block is damaged, say on account of a local contaminant or an error on the surface.
An excerpt from Richard Feynman’s lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.
If the hole is in the top position and the chlorine atom is therefore on the bottom, then the bit is a 0.
In 1959, physicist Richard Feynman speculated that if a platform could arrange individual atoms in an exact orderly pattern, it would be possible to store one piece of information per atom.
Otte remains optimistic, however, as he sees no physical boundaries that will prevent them from speeding up the process to similar speeds that are seen in current storage drives. “It will be a technological challenge for sure, but in terms of physics it should work”.
The system can not function in an everyday environment. This allows the memory to be scaled up easily to very big sizes, even if the copper surface is not entirely ideal.
The only problem is that for the technique to work, a temperature of nearly -200 degrees Celsius (-328F) must be reached in a near-perfect vacuum. For the prototype, the scientists sprayed a flat copper bed with around 60,000 chlorine atoms.
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As impressive as creating atomic memory devices is, Otte said that for him, “The most important implication is not at all the data storage itself”. “Many MRI scanners in hospitals are kept at helium temperature permanently, so in that sense it is not as extreme as it may sound at first”. The breakthrough is believed to have reduced the storage limit to the ultimate limit possible.
