New York Times cites Science: “New storage device is very small, at 12 atoms”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0211
Consider John Markoff’s opening from the top-center article on the 13 January New York Times business section front page:
Researchers at I.B.M. have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible.
The findings, being reported Thursday in the journal Science, could help lead to a new class of nanomaterials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities than the current silicon-based computers but will consume significantly less power. And they may offer a new direction for research in quantum computing.
Besides IBM, authors of the Science article represent, in Germany, the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, Hamburg, and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Stuttgart, and in Switzerland, the physics department at the University of Basel. Here’s their abstract:
Control of magnetism on the atomic scale is becoming essential as data storage devices are miniaturized. We show that antiferromagnetic nanostructures, composed of just a few Fe atoms on a surface, exhibit two magnetic states, the Néel states, that are stable for hours at low temperature. For the smallest structures, we observed transitions between Néel states due to quantum tunneling of magnetization. We sensed the magnetic states of the designed structures using spin-polarized tunneling and switched between them electrically with nanosecond speed. Tailoring the properties of neighboring antiferromagnetic nanostructures enables a low-temperature demonstration of dense nonvolatile storage of information.
Markoff’s somewhat technically detailed Times article quotes Shan X. Wang, director of the Center for Magnetic Nanotechnology at Stanford University: ‘Magnetic materials are extremely useful and strategically important to many major economies, but there aren’t that many of them. To make a brand new material is very intriguing and scientifically very important.’
Markoff explains that less than a year ago, a group from Hamburg ‘reported on the ability to perform computer logic operations on an atomic level’ and that the IBM effort ‘has now created the smallest possible unit of magnetic storage by painstakingly arranging two rows of six iron atoms on a surface of copper nitride.’
The article reports that computer industry analysts said the IBM work ‘heralded a new direction for nanotechnology and that it might offer a route to new kinds of nanomaterials.’ Markoff quotes Richard Doherty, whom he calls ‘an electrophysicist’ who directs an industry consulting firm: ‘The information storage side of this is fantastic, but this truly changes our ideas of the behavior of materials at molecular levels.’
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.