IBM stores data inside 12 atoms

Scientists put together 2 lines of 6 atoms in a lab and used it to store and retrieve 1s and 0s   London - Arabstoday Researchers have created the world’s smallest storage device - made up of just 12 atoms. A group of scientists painstakingly put together two lines of six atoms in a lab and used it to store and retrieve 1s and 0s. Their creation - already hailed as ‘very important’ - could pave the way for a new generation of electronics. Even the best currently available magnetic storage systems need around one million atoms to store 1s and 0s. The discovery is being described as a stepping stone to making a new class of memory chips that will make computers even smaller. They will also use significantly less power. Although the researchers needed just 12 atoms per bit of information, they were able to squeeze a whole byte, or eight bits, into just 96 atoms. A 'byte' is the amount of information required to store one character on a keyboard. They were then able to code the IBM motto ‘Think’ by programming the block of atoms to store the five letters. 'The entire information technology industry is squeezing everything it can out of Moore’s Law,' says IBM, referring to the famous pursuing incremental improvements in scaling and performance. 'So far, that’s served us well – computers that used to occupy entire rooms now fit into our pockets.' 'The ability to manipulate matter by its most basic components - atom by atom – and explore their properties from the 'bottom up,' enabled IBM Research to answer the question of how many atoms it really takes to reliably store one bit of magnetic information:12.' The breakthrough was as a result of the work by IBM’s Almaden Research Centre in San Jose, California. The IBM team for the first time in the world managed to employ a special form of magnetism for data storage purposes called antiferromagnetism, in which each of the iron atoms they used was magnetised opposite to its neighbour. As a result they are magnetically neutral in bulk, so they will not interfere with each other and are stable enough to hold data. Shan Wang, director of the Center for Magnetic Nanotechnology at Stanford University, told the New York Times: ‘Magnetic materials are extremely useful and strategically important to many major economies, but there aren’t that many of them. ‘To make a brand new material is very intriguing and scientifically very important.’ Antiferromagnetic materials are being touted as the next generation of nano storage and recording heads in hard disk drives. They are also used in the latest kind of memory chips like STT-RAM which are set to surpass Flash cards and DRAM devices. Richard Doherty an electrophysicist and director of U.S. consulting firm Envisioneering, added: ‘Nanotechnology labs are going to begin asking: ‘What else is going on down there?’ ‘The information storage side of this is fantastic, but this truly changes our ideas of the behaviour of materials at molecular levels.’