Capacity of modern media is astounding - and even ten years ago was just a fantasy. But this is not the limit: recently managed to create a vehicle that holds a bit of data in cell size 4h16 nm, only 12 atoms. One byte will require 96 atoms - then the latest hard drives as it takes about 500 million atoms.
German scientists jointly with IBM received a prototype device in the laboratory by manipulating individual atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope, one after another, building up an ordered array of particles in the size 2x6 atoms.
By calculations of the authors, it is 12 atoms - the minimum number that is appropriate to store 1 bit of information in which the quantum laws have not yet begin to significantly distort the state of the system. Couple hexatomic series can have two possible magnetic states, which together act as a logical 0 or 1. Needle tunneling microscope enables using weak electromagnetic pulses to transfer them from one state to another, recording the information, and even weaker pulses allow her to read.
Note that if the current hard disks used ferromagnetic properties, the new device is based on the opposite phenomenon - antifferomagnetizme. The magnetic moments of atoms arranged in an array in opposite directions, so that the magnetization of the array as a whole is very small. It is possible to tightly packed rows of hexatomic, brought them to a pair of 1 nm to each other.
Alas, before the ... For example, while preserving the data that the array of atoms have to keep at a temperature close to absolute zero (-268 º C). However, scientists believe that the price is not very substantial increase in memory - up to about 200 atoms - they will be able to raise the operating temperature to room. After all, even 200 atoms - is many orders of magnitude smaller than that of most modern media.
