For the sake of comparison, typical pc hard drives need almost one thousand thousand atoms to store a little. This analysis might thus pave the thanks to abundant smaller, faster and additional energy-efficient hard drives.
"The chip business will continue its pursuit of incremental scaling in semiconductor technology," said Andreas Heinrich, the lead investigator into atomic storage at IBM analysis in California. he's talking regarding Moore's Law, the trend that pc power doubles each two years.
"But, as components continue to shrink, the march continues to the inevitable finish point: the atom," says Heinrich. "We're taking the opposite approach and starting with the smallest unit -- single atoms -- to make computing devices one atom at a time."
There are two issues when engaging at these nanoscopic scales. If you have got too few atoms you begin to enter the weird, unpredictable and counter-intuitive world of quantum mechanics. after you increase to twelve atoms you cross something of a threshold, let alone quantum behaviour and going back to a comfortable and predictable magnetic structure.
The other problem is that, at this scale, using magnets to have an effect on atoms can toy with neighbouring bits as the result of the magnetic field. Typical hard drives use ferromagnets where all the atoms are aligned in their spin -- however at this scale it causes the bits to interfere with one another.
So at IBM's lab they used antiferromagnetically coupled atoms, where every atom spins in the opposite direction to its nearest neighbour. This allowed the engineers to pack adjacent magnetic bits abundant nearer together than was previously doable, greatly increasing the magnetic storage density without disrupting the state of neighbouring bits.
This analysis is something of a breakthrough, however the days of storing your entire hard drive in atoms (something like 10^14 atoms would be needed to carry a terabyte) may be a decade or two off.
Drive makers will need a scanning tunneling microscope to individually tweak single or little clusters of atoms -- fine for the 60 atoms you would like to store the word "THINK", not nice for an iPod's 32GB drive. Plus, the nano hard drive only works at very cold temperatures. Outside a freezer you'd lose your information in minutes.
