Create storage device 500 times more powerful than current – Channel 44 News Channel

Delft. Researchers at the Technical University of Delft, in the Netherlands, have created a 500 times more powerful data storage device that best available today thanks to the chlorine atoms, according to a study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

“theoretically allow a capacity equivalent to that of all ever written in the size of a single postage stamp books storage,” explains the director of the study, Sander Otte.

the spaces of a grid of chlorine atoms on a copper surface bits and bytes are stored

As a tribute to one of the decisive parents of this technology, the American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988)., the researchers wrote in a box just 100 nanometers (one billionth of a meter) part of his famous speech of 1959 There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, which laid the foundation of nanotechnology.

researchers served as the ability of chlorine atoms to be arranged in a two-dimensional autonomously grid. As there were fewer chlorine atoms necessary for full coverage were created in the grid spaces, called vacancies. With one and a chlorine atom formed a bit, the smallest unit of data storage. In a horizontal projection, “opening up, atom down” means zero, while “atom up, vacancy down” means one.

To store data, the researchers had to move atoms using a microscope tunneling. This instrument allows explain the atomic structure of a surface through a conductive tip (one atom) and the bias current applied therebetween. If applied to the conductive tip a stream of micro amp, it makes a chlorine atom moves to a vacancy.

The expert team has managed to automate the process, so that the microscope moved tunneling atoms vacancy vacant until bits boxes are created. To keep the grid stable, each bit is limited by chlorine atoms, so that there is no bit next to another.

Currently, to read a block of 64 bits one minute is required, while to write it takes two. Moreover, the process only works at a temperature of 196 degrees Celsius. “The daily data storage at the atomic scale is still far away,” said Otte.

“But thanks to this success have taken a big step forward”.

That same opinion Steven Erwin, the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. In a commentary article, the expert writes that regardless of the complications that bring the acceleration of the process of writing and reading, is an achievement to note that “stimulate our imagination to the next milestone”.