If it's real. The first time back in the 90's was proven to be false.
Big Blue boffins cram information onto a cool 12 atoms
Boffins at IBM Research's Almaden centre have stored one bit in 12 atoms - creating a memory that's 150 times denser than NAND flash. They used the anti-ferromagnetism phenomenon to order the 12 atoms in a stable group that retained its properties for several hours, and wasn't influenced by neighbouring groups. A byte needs 96 …
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Friday 13th January 2012 13:28 GMT M7S
Does this make the data more vulnerable?
If a bit is stored on a correspondingly smaller number of atoms (assuming that this research leads to a product, although I note the delay suggested in the article) does this mean that that data could be corrupted by a weaker external force such as, for example, a magnetic field? I'm not suggesting that more atoms gives any kind of RAID type redundancy, but perhaps a larger group or atoms it might be less of a "moveable object" by comparison to the smaller group, or be able to lose a single atom without ill effect, the relative propotions being different.
Would that mean that any protective case might need therefore to be stronger/heavier to compensate for our increasingly EM-rich environment? Also in relationt this I have no idea if the casing around most HDDs functions as a Faraday cage. Perhaps an appropriately educated person could enlighten me on these questions.
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Friday 13th January 2012 20:56 GMT Oninoshiko
You seem to have missed his point
It's an interesting idea, but the parent's point is that it requires temperatures to be low enough to that it can't be maintained by any reasonable means.
Call it a "breakthrough" all you want, but until it's able to be done at room temperature rather then temperatures so low they do not naturally occur on earth it's not USEFUL.
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Friday 13th January 2012 15:32 GMT Stevie
Bah!
I liked the way the author of this piece filled out the space where the working temperature of the substrate was supposed to go with a side-discussion of freezing water and the startling introduction to the hitherto-unknown "Kelvin" scale.
I recall a similar ploy used by me on my mock O-Level English exam which involved a book I hadn't read enough of.
This excellent tactic was entirely successful in filling up the disturbing amount of white paper in the answer booklet.
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Friday 13th January 2012 21:31 GMT GBE
I too shook my head at the "Kelvin" stuff.
Yea, the bit about "Kelvins" was baffling.
First of all, the unit name in question is not capitalized.
Second of all, a temperature (regardless of how it's defined) can be
expressed in any number of units (e.g., kelvins, degrees Celsius,
degrees Farenheit, degrees Rankine). I presume there's an official
Reg unit of temperature, but memory fails me.
I think what the author was trying to say (and failed completely to do
so) was that the temperature is a really, really cold temperature. I
presume the meaningless blurb about kelvins was because for really,
really cold temperatures, one usually uses kelvins as the units since
that gives you smallish positive numbers, and people can think more
easily when dealing with smallish positive numbers.
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