Hard disk: back on the molecular storage

The hard drive is becoming 50,000 times more dense. Finally, it remains to the road before coming to industrialise the process...

We you talked about at the beginning of the year, IBM would have found a way to store a magnetic bit with only 12 atoms. Other researchers of the University of Karlsruhe, at Strasbourg and Tokyo would for their successful feat with a single molecule of 51 atoms. If researchers at these universities are not better than those of IBM, the feat is in the form of the maintenance of the State of the bit.

The Interior of a kind of shell maintained by these 50 atoms constituting the organic molecule, they placed a last atom of iron. Thus, by spin transition, the iron atom can be charged either positively or negatively to induce a change of State and therefore be read a posteriori as a bit to 0 or 1.

kit_molecular_storage

Molecular storage of KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

Toshio Miyamachi, researcher at the Center for functional nanostructures of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) indicates that with its structure as nanomolecule, it is possible to store 50,000 times more information on an area equivalent to our current with a reliability hard drives since it is here to add or remove from the electrons in an atom of iron. To compare, if we take a disk trays of 1 sold To currently in the trade, we could then obtain almost 50 inches (or 50 million GB) with this technique.

If the technique seems simple, in practice it is more complicated because he must write the bit in each nanomolecule. With our technology of reading and writing at positioned magnetic head perpendicular to the plateau, he will have to find a way to reduce the finesse of this head to match the fineness of the molecule. A new field of research is therefore opened for its universities and which we will still hear talk about for years to come.


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