A corner of the library of the United States Library of Congress
A few days ago, a research team from the University of Delft in the Netherlands published their latest research results in Nature Nanotechnology, a reusable storage device that uses a single atom to store information.
"Natural Nanotechnology" reported that, theoretically, the technology can store 500TB of data in a square inch (about one SD card size), which is equivalent to depositing all of the entire US Library of Congress in an area of ​​0.1 square millimeter. Archives and books. However, the actual effect the team is currently demonstrating is only 1 KB in 0.1 mm2.
In fact, physicists had atomic control capabilities as early as 25 years ago. In 1990, physicist Don Eigler was able to use a scanning tunneling electron microscope to arrange 35 Helium atoms into "IBM". However, because of the extreme instability of atoms under normal temperature conditions, the technical cost of controlling atoms is high, and the appropriate storage medium (that is, which atom is used) is not well determined, which makes the scientific community adopt the idea of ​​atomic storage of data. Has not been achieved.
Physicist Don Eigler arranges "IBM" with 35 helium atoms in 1990
Over the years, with the progress of the times, the development of electronic science and technology has finally made atomic storage possible.
Delft University's scientific team adsorbed chloride ions on a pre-plated grid of copper, and then controlled the distribution of chlorine atoms in the grid through the latest scanning tunneling electron microscope and a special “tweezers†to contain chlorine atoms and voids. Arranged in different combinations, representing a binary 0 or 1, respectively, to achieve data storage. The specific arrangement of atoms and vacancies is shown in the following figure:
The dark color in the figure represents a chlorine atom, and the light color represents a gap. Each of the four squares represents a grid. Each grid represents one data bit, and each grid represents one byte. The line in the figure represents the lowercase letter e in binary ASCII encoding.
This implementation has two main advantages over the 1990 approach.
First, because the atom's periphery is vacant, it is entirely fine to move within the grid in an atom-specific manner. This increases the stability of the device relative to the physicist Don Eigler's practice of fixing the atom at one point. This stability also brings an advantage. Atomic control, previously required to achieve low temperatures of -210°C, can now meet the requirements of -196°C.
On the other hand, because scientists can mark each grid (such as placing another atom in the upper left corner), this greatly increases the speed of data reads. Once you need to read one after the other completely on the grid, and then go back and judge whether the data that has been read is exactly one byte. Now you only need to read it in order, and hit the mark to represent a byte. It may take up to several days to read a set of data from the past. It is now OK in just a few hours.
Of course, there are still many immature places in this technology. For example, the temperature of liquid helium-196°C low temperature environment is still very high, and can not be practically applied. Although the speed is relatively faster than before, but still can not meet the daily needs and so on. However, the exciting point is that this technology may indicate the direction of future development of atomic memory technology, and we look forward to a greater breakthrough in the future.
Source:nature
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