
IBM has found a way to store data on a single atom - ValG
https://www.cnet.com/news/ibm-storage-atom-breakthrough-quantum-computing-research/
======
dahart
> a single atom of the element holmium carefully placed on a surface of
> magnesium oxide. A special-purpose microscope uses a tiny amount of
> electrical current to flip the atom's orientation one way or the other,
> corresponding to writing a 1 or 0. The researchers then read the data by
> measuring the atom's electromagnetic properties.

I'm not sure I could have recalled the existence of the element holmium, I've
never heard or read much about it. I looked it up, and found the likely reason
it was used for this research:

"Holmium has the highest magnetic permeability of any element and therefore is
used for the polepieces of the strongest static magnets."
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmium](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmium)

I don't know if we'll see practical atomic storage or if more than one bit per
atom is physically possible, but in theory there's enough space in an atom to
hold millions of bits. But I think you have to get to black hole density...
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound)

~~~
inlineint
Just note that in practice nobody wants to keep their data storing atoms
frozen near absolute zero, but rather prefer to have them at temperature close
to 300 K.

However to store 1 bit of information at given temperature the energy
difference between state corresponding to 0 and state corresponding to 1 has
to be not less than something of order kT ≈ 0.02, otherwise the information
would be quickly erased by thermal motion. But if we take maximum energy gap
at atom that might be used for storing information to be upper bounded by
atom's ionization energy [1], it turns out that it can't be larger than
something of order 10 eV. So it doesn't seem to be possible to store more than
hundreds or thousands of bits per atom at room temperature.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionization_energies_of_the_ele...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionization_energies_of_the_elements_\(data_page\))

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Could you please expand on your kT ~ 0.02 calculation?

~~~
inlineint
Sorry, it was of course 0.02 eV, not just 0.02 :)

k = 1.38e-23 J/K = 8.6e-5 eV/K, so kT = 0.025 eV for T = 300 K.

~~~
baq
of course ;)

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hermitdev
Things like this were partially why I got interested in electrical engineering
& physics. Sadly, 15 years later, my career deviated to financial software,
but I still find articles & progressions like these fascinating.

~~~
gnarbarian
It's not too late if you're willing to take a pay cut.

~~~
hermitdev
Unfortunately, I've lost a lot of my EE knowledge due to mental atrophy.

~~~
georgeburdell
You'd be surprised how quickly it comes back. I recently had to design a
simple ~50 node circuit after ~10 years of not doing anything of the sort, and
I had it simulated in SPICE and prototyped after maybe 10 hours of work over a
few days.

~~~
hwillis
We had to learn SPICE in my ECE program. I found that inexplicable- writing a
circuit in SPICE is like using a slide rule. I can derive a circuit on paper
(just as I can do math), and I can use an _actual_ circuit analyzer (just as I
can use a calculator). Knowing the foundations of simulation programs is
justifiable, but using and practicing with them is just excessive. As the
circuits got more complex, I "cheated" by using a script to generate netlists
and eventually I just used LTSPICE because christ, I have better things to do
than type until my fingerprints wear smooth.

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Kattywumpus
Atom storage has been done before by others. This example at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison from 2002 comes to mind:

[http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2002/080702/Ultimate_memory_de...](http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2002/080702/Ultimate_memory_demoed_080702.html)

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ankurdhama
Storage medium is just part of the equation. The other important and hard part
is the mechanism that is required to read and write data to that medium. Would
you use a CD as a storage medium when the CD reader/writer is size of a
washing machine?

~~~
dahart
> Would you use a CD as a storage medium when the CD reader/writer is size of
> a washing machine?

Yes, according to history, if that's all anyone had. :)

IBM's project might be the ENIAC of molecular storage devices. Only time will
tell. Keep in mind your example doesn't go far enough to match past history,
we used to actually have _much_ worse than 600MB / washing machine. We used to
have 100 words / warehouse.

"By the end of its operation in 1955, ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes,
7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and
approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It weighed more than 30 short
tons (27 t), was roughly 2.4m × 0.9m × 30m (8 × 3 × 100 feet) in size,
occupied 167m2 (1800 ft2) and consumed 150 kW of electricity."

"In 1953, a 100-word magnetic-core memory built by the Burroughs Corporation
was added to ENIAC"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC)

* EDIT: It'd be more fair to use punch cards as ENIAC's storage mechanism to compare against, and punch cards held a lot more than 100 words. Anyway, still, crazy by today's standards, right?

~~~
Arizhel
To be fair, there's a difference between long-term storage and working memory.
The magnetic-core memory you're talking about is RAM, not storage. Though it
is looking like the two may converge some time in the future, until now
"working memory" (RAM) in computers has always been far lower-density than
storage, but far faster, for use in computations (and also volatile, unlike
storage which is non-volatile). It's the equivalent of comparing your brain's
short-term memory (when thinking about a problem) to your hand-written notes.
Punch cards are indeed the appropriate comparison.

But to get back to your original point, a washing-machine-sized storage
machine is perfectly acceptable if that's all your technology allows. In fact,
it'd even be acceptable now, if it allowed you to replace what currently takes
a whole data center's worth of hard drives. I'm sure Google would be ecstatic
if they could store all of YouTube on a single machine the size of a washing
machine.

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mikenew
Can we stop measuring data storage in units of 'song'?

~~~
danso
I think it's a good unit of comparison. Virtually everyone has listened to a
song to completion, and a very large number of people have done so in the past
24 hours, or even hour. It's also much easier to quantify the _length_ of a
song. Whereas with books: well, it's been a couple months at least since I've
finished a new book. And number of pages in a book is not as meaningful to the
human experience as _amount of time_. And the amount of time spent on a book
-- i.e. minute per page -- greatly varies per human.

Sure, according to who you ask, a 3-minute Justin Bieber song contains less
"data" than a 3-minute Bob Dylan song, but at least the quantifying of time is
consistent among different people (um, relatively speaking).

And sure, 26 million songs is still as hard to comprehend as 26 million books.
But again, more people can quantify how much of their life a song takes
because most people have more recently consumed a song's worth of information.

The variance between data storage for song (e.g. length, kbps) is not
meaningfully different enough in terms of order of magnitude.

~~~
Retr0spectrum
Raw studio-quality audio and highly compressed mp3s are multiple orders of
magnitude apart.

~~~
danso
When the average reader has to store/port songs in bulk, which of those
formats are they using?

~~~
Retr0spectrum
An unknown quantity somewhere in the middle.

~~~
function_seven
A “song” is about 4-10MB. Good enough for a colloquial point of reference.

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mrfusion
I like the idea of storing information by using two stable isotopes of carbon
into a diamond. It would last a long time and be extremely compact.

Has anyone looked into that?

~~~
adrianN
How would you read that information?

~~~
mrfusion
I guess that's what they have to work out.

You could do graphene instead and then just read it out row by row?

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Rampoina
How is the single atom isolated? And how can you make sure there's only one?

~~~
tcpekin
The atoms are manipulated by a scanning tunneling microscope [1], which allows
you to both image and manipulate single atoms, as shown in the movie "A Boy
and His Atom" [2], also made by IBM. You can make sure there's only one by
just taking an image at a resolution high enough to see single atoms.

This is fundamentally a scanning technique. A very sharp tip, down to a few
atoms at the point, sometimes capped with a single carbon nanotube, is scanned
across the surface of whatever sample you have, which for a measurement like
this, must be almost atomically flat. A bias is applied between the sample and
the tip, and quantum tunnelling can allow for electrons to move between the
sample and the tip. This current can then be measured, and correlated with
sample height or electronic properties of the sample. If you scanning step
size is less than that of the size of an atom, you can then image single atoms
by detecting the change in current due to a different species of atom, or due
to the change in height between your flat surface and tip when an atom is
sticking out of the top of the surface.

To manipulate the atoms, the tip is moved close enough to an adatom that it
begins to form a weak bond with the tip. The tip then can move and essentially
drag the adatom with it to wherever the researchers want. [3]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_and_His_Atom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_and_His_Atom)

[3] [https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/atom-manipulation-
sca...](https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/atom-manipulation-scanning-
tunneling-microscope)

------
nol13
If there's an atom there, it's a 1?

~~~
Sanddancer
Magnetic orientation, probably. Elsethread, it was mentioned that they used
Holmium, which is the most magnetically reactive element.

------
alanbernstein
There's plenty of room at the bottom, after all...

~~~
ladytron
Upvote for Feynman, always

------
a012
Maybe a few decades from now, our children will look at photos of 10MB HDD,
8TB HDD, then 8PiB HDD then have a smile how technology evolve.

~~~
GordonS
As a child (showing my age here) I remember getting a 20MB HDD for our desktop
machine (might have been an Olivetti with a 286 CPU, I don't remember). At the
time, that seemed an _incredible_ amount of storage - "how will I ever fill
that", I thought!

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awinter-py
Couple of years ago a japanese team used an iodine atom to compute a fourier
transform. The computation was faster than a computer but the ETL was super
slow.

IBM has been pushing stuff around with a tunneling microscope for decades.

It's cool but the press should report the transfer rate.

------
michaelmwangi
This very much reminds me of
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0)
which they did a couple of year ago

------
ksec
Finally we can test the limit of ZFS. /s

~~~
gbrown_
Only "/s" as this remains a "Boil the oceans" problem ;)

[https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_y...](https://blogs.oracle.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_storage_are_you)

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kator
800 Petabyte Hard Disks for sale?

~~~
adtac
Is that like a theoretical limit or are is it just a big number?

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fred_is_fred
the atom was then given 30 days to move to a "core" molecule.

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visarga
This website is a piece of shit. It autostarts a second video off screen even
after I swatted the first one that popped on the right, covering the text of
the article.

~~~
nickpeterson
Is a piece better or worse than a pile, I'm not familiar with the unit
conversions.

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kevinSuttle
Yet, can't handle figure out a way to support remote employees.

~~~
Razengan
Why do people do this?

News: "A does X."

You: "They don't do Y."

What is the thought process involved in this behavior?

~~~
johnfn
The thought process is that someone gets badly burned by Y, so the association
with A becomes very strong - stronger than any other association. Now every
time someone mentions A, they bring up Y.

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dredmorbius
This is IBM:

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/bshytzp0on1dfvjdfw4-vq](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/bshytzp0on1dfvjdfw4-vq)

