This is according to a prototype built by researchers at the University of Wisconsin. The way from the actual experiment is still far
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Avi Blizovsky
Imagine a CD containing not 650 megabytes but 650 million megabytes. Such storage capacity is now theoretically possible thanks to the extreme use of individual atoms for data storage. This is what the BBC website says. However, David Whitehouse, the site's scientific editor, says that such storage systems should not be expected in the near future. The gap between theory and practice is wide.
In 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics, discovered that all the words that have been put down in writing throughout history could be written on one cube of material the size of a tenth of a millimeter, if the letters were written in atoms. Now scientists have done just that, when they created a memory in which they used silicon atoms to place the 0's and 1's used to store data.
Such a study was reported in the journal Nanotechnology. The scientists say the research represents a crude step toward developing practical storage devices in which atoms represent bits of information.
"This is now proof of the applicability of what Feynman said 40 years ago." said Franz Hempsel of the University of Wisconsin.
The memory created by Hempsel provides a storage density a million times higher than today's CD ROM discs. Atoms may be the physical limit for minimizing the storage capacity of binary information. Their tiny size allows for this huge storage capacity. A grain of sand, for example, contains 10 million billion atoms.
The new memory is made on a silicon surface by removing certain atoms using a device that is operated while viewing with a scanning tunneling microscope. The spaces represent the bits of information stored. Conventional storage systems use millions of atoms per bit.
However, while it is theoretically possible to use individual atoms to store bits, in reality it may be many decades before we see a practical version of atomic memory. This is because of the problems of working with single atoms at room temperature and the slow pace of putting data into the atomic memory or taking it out almost manually.
Intermediate: DNA data
The researchers say that an important aspect of their work is that the memory density is similar to that in which nature stores the data on the DNA molecule.
The Wisconsin Atomic Memory team uses 20 atoms to store one bit of information, including the space around a single bit. In DNA, nature uses 32 atoms to store information in half of a pair of chemical bases that serve as the basic units that store the genetic information.
Compared to conventional storage media, both the DNA and the silicon surface greatly increase the storage density.
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