IBM offers a new way of super-dense information recording: 1 bit to 1 atom

IBM has developed a way of storing information, which in the future will probably allow you to record huge amounts of data on a very small area of ​​the drive. This is a recording density of 1 bit to 1 atom. In order to understand the essence of the achievement, it is enough to say that now the density of information on the hard disk is 1 bit to 100 thousand atoms.

If it is possible to put into practice the achievement of IBM, then on a medium the size of a credit card it will be possible to save, for example, the entire collection of iTunes music, which is about 35 million musical compositions. To record this density, scientists decided to use the atoms of the rare-earth holmium metal from the lanthanide group.

The atoms of this metal are located on a substrate of magnesium oxide. Holmium retains the magnetic poles of the atoms of its crystal lattice even in the presence of external magnets. To record 1 bit, an ultra-thin needle is used, which generates an electric current, changing the orientation of the atom. The main problem lies in precisely changing the magnetic centers of atoms. In addition, in addition to recording information, it still needs to be read somehow.

Specialists at the IBM Almaden Research Center used a scanning tunneling microscope, passing through it electrical pulses. Each such impulse swaps the magnetic poles of an atom. This corresponds to 0 or 1. It should be noted that the effect of the conservation of individual magnetization is manifested in holmium atoms only on a substrate of magnesium oxide.

But reading the state of metal atoms is carried out using the effect of tunnel magnetoresistance. This process occurs when the iron atom is placed at a distance of one nanometer from the holmium atom. After this, the so-called electron paramagnetic resonance of the electron spin occurs with the registration of the magnetic state of the holmium atom. That is, we can talk about reading information.


A special sensor was developed by IBM about a year ago. It belongs to the class of electron spin resonance sensors. At certain values ​​of the frequency and intensity of the magnetic field, an unpaired electron in a rare-earth metal atom loses thermodynamic equilibrium. The moment of exit and is fixed by the sensor. The sensor allows you to read the magnetic state of the carrier atom.

In an experiment to test a new way of writing and reading information, scientists were able to read the state of two holmium atoms. If scientists were able to realize all the possibilities of this method of working with information, then only one gram of holmium could save about 456 exabytes of data.

Unfortunately, this method is still very difficult to implement in practice, since both a tunneling electron microscope cooled by liquid nitrogen and a vacuum are required. However, this is only the initial stage of research. And, as this often happens, in the future the method can be finalized, supplemented by new technologies and implemented.