Storage Innovation Keeps Delivering Surprises: Page 2 of 3

You can't backup your hard disk to an atom just yet. But, if the NSF is right, this is a big step forward. Here is how they explained it:

The international team has demonstrated that information stored in the nucleus has a lifetime of about 1 3/4 seconds. This is significant because before this technique was developed, the longest researchers could preserve quantum information in silicon was less than one-tenth of a second. Other researchers studying quantum computing recently calculated that if a quantum system could store information for at least one second, error correction techniques could then protect that data for an indefinite period of time...


Quantum computing is seen as a holy grail of computing because each individual piece of information, or 'bit', can have more than one value at once... A quantum bit, or qubit, could be both 1 and 0 at the same time. That means a single qubit has twice the power of a normal bit, and once qubits start interacting with each other, the processing power increases exponentially.

The research was funded in part by the NSF and will be described in detail this week in the journal Nature. Scientists working on the team that reported the accomplishment came from Princeton University , University of Oxford , and the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories . They used both the electron and nucleus of a phosphorous atom embedded in a silicon crystal, and both the electron and nucleus behaved as tiny quantum magnets capable of storing quantum information.

If that isn't futuristic enough for you, how about "nanostructured storage domains"? A report in Science Daily tells us that a team of German and Italian researchers are trying to increase storage capacity using nanopatterns of a spin-transition compound on silicon oxide chips. The development could lead the way to molecular storage media that stores data by the "switching" the spin of electrons.

The breakthrough was reported by scientists, led by Massimiliano Cavallini at the National Research Council in Bologna, Italy, and Mario Ruben at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe in Germany, in the journal Angewandte Chemie. As storage managers know, data requires a unique "address" for each location that can be identified by the writing and reading units. This, in turn, requires an interface that makes the nanoscopic spin-state transitions of the molecular switching units compatible with the microscale instrument environment. This is possible if the spin-transition compound can be put into a highly ordered micro- or nano-structure, according to the report. This team has achieved that and produced readable logic patterns with a spin-transfer compound. Now they have to make it work in room-temperature conditions.