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Individual Atom Memory Created
azav writes "University of Wisconsin-Madison Scientists have created "atomic scale" memory using individual atoms of Silicon." A cool photo can be found on the site as well.
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Single atom memory? How stable do they REALLY expect that to be?
Ha! What's the name of the technology? Alzheimer's Access Memory?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
.. not to be too repetitive, but this was posted only a month ago..
0 8/0116255&mode=thread&tid=126
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/
about moore's law?
And a brick wall?
Methinks there is no higher density than bit-per-atom.
hrm... bit per electron...
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
"If you can read this, you're WAAAY too close!"
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
As a matter of fact, yes.
Not all atoms are the same size. Remember what you learned about atomic weights?
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
"Reading the memory consists of a simple, one-dimensional scan, because it is self-formatted into precise tracks. There is no need to search in two dimensions for the location of a bit. The signal is highly predictable since all atoms have the same shape and occur on well-defined lattice sites. That allows for a high level of filtering and error correction"
"Writing is more difficult. While atoms can be positioned controllably at liquid helium temperature, that is much harder to achieve that at room temperature"
You just have to start storing multiple states in one atom. The Quantum Computing people have been talking about that for years.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
if I licked my finger and rubbed ...
Last time i checked same happens to the good old fassioned floopy disk..
I guess the scientist were surprised to find that the atoms stayed where they were left
Exactly. Verry slow at present but being able to keep the atoms where they were put is a step towards a viable atomic storage.
So someone found a way to spend a lot of time using the electron microscope...
Yes electron microscopes have been used to move atoms before. The breakthrough (ignoring the fact it was posted a month ago) is that the self creating tracks and the fact the atoms can be packed at high density and stay there.
On an offtopic side note:
There seems to be an abnormally high number of Trolls on this paticular story. Any ideas why??
Orthanc
Just as long as you don't arrange atoms in a way that could, using some sort of algorithm, produce a recording of some popular music. Otherwise, the RIAA's nano-bots, will deconstruct your atoms.. with permission of the US government
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
"Last time i checked same happens to the good old fassioned floopy disk.."
no no, with a floppy disk you just have to stick it in your pocket, 9/10 it will corrupt. Thats why i'm sad enough to duplicate all my files on floppy's and sometimes use 2 different disks. Im sure you could probably duplicate the atomic memory too, it would still be amazing density even at half capacity, even at 1/10 capacity. They can decrease the duplication as the technology for better reliability increases.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
In 1959, physics icon Richard Feynman predicted that all the words written in the history of the world could be contained in a cube of material one two-hundredths of an inch wide.
And then we'd need a new search engine just to find the damn thing.
Fortunately, the text would probably be stored in the innovative MS Word format, which guarantees that the physical size of the required storage capacity will remain constant over time, no matter what the information density of the storage medium.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Bartender replies "Are you sure?"
Atom thinks for a second: "Yea I'm positive."
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
I had an incredibly insightfull and informative post to make, but I stored it on an atomic scale memory smaller than a spec of dust. Now I can't remember where I put it.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I found a remarkable proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but this 512 terabyte memory cube is too small to contain it.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Actually, they are all rougly the same size, regardless of atomic weight. This is one of the interesting things about quantum mechanics and atomic physics. *All* atoms are between 0.5 and 2.5 Angstroms (1e-10 m)with Cesium being the largest (bigger than Uranium) and Nitrogen? being the smallest. Silicon isn't very large, however. This is partially because the electrons are so far away from a VERY tiny nucleus (remember the football field/grain of salt analogy).
$ solvechess
Please prepare and format 10 Dyson Spheres and fill them with crystalline silicon.
Please insert Dyson Sphere 1 and press enter...
Working..........(10%)
Please insert Dyson Sphere 2 and press enter...
Working...(13%), inf remaining.
Fun, fun, fun. And now we'll put those into a RAID 6+6. How many would you need at least and how many could fail before you lose any data? For bonus points, give the smallest possible distance you could leave between the spheres to keep them separated using no more than the power output of a Sol-like star on each and calculate the mass of all spheres combined. If possible draw a small diagram of how the spheres had to be placed for maximum stability.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Since most operating systems are 16 and 32 bit in nature, why do we continue to use binary memory? Why not have memory that can somehow represent 16 or 32 states?
If those are silicon atoms in the photo then what are the grooves in between the rows of atoms?
I know the secrets of the video game champs
If the picture is of atoms, what is under them?
I've always wondered that when I see an electron shot like this. Anyone know?
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
great minds...
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Actually, they are all rougly the same size, regardless of atomic weight. This is one of the interesting things about quantum mechanics and atomic physics. *All* atoms are between 0.5 and 2.5 Angstroms (1e-10 m)with Cesium being the largest (bigger than Uranium) and Nitrogen? being the smallest. Silicon isn't very large, however.
Hydrogen's the smallest, according to my books, with a radius of something like 0.53 angstroms (been a while since I looked it up).
What confuses me is why the atomic radii don't go up as the square of the number of shells. The alkali metals will have a single electron in the outermost shell, with the nucleus shielded by the inner shells, and so having an apparent charge of one. This seems to give a system with size equivalent to the nth energy level of an electron in hydrogen, which goes up as the square of the shell number.
I and the friends I asked about this speculate that because the electrons in the sheilding shells are smeared out radially, the outermost shielding shell extends past the valence shell's nominal radius, and so the core is only partly shielded, but I haven't seen any description to date of how you work out what the radii actually end up being.
Any pointers/quick explanations?
Someone (one of the few people who made an *intelligent* reply, anyway) Mentioned memory density. Out of curiosity I decided to figure out exactly how much data per square inch you could fit using this tecnique... Silicon has a van der Waals (minimum, non-bonding) radius of 210pm, or 2.1e-10 meters (8.27e-9 inches). That means the closest you could possibly pack them is 4.2e-10 meters on-center (1.65e-8 inches). That means you can pack about 60,400,000 silicon atoms in single file, or a whopping 3,600,000,000,000,000 atoms per square inch! That boils down to about 415.7 terabytes! Comparatively, current holographic memory systems can (last I checked) reliably store up to 25.6 megabytes per square inch, but of course it has the added feature of using the full volume of the media, and extreamely fast read/write times. =Smidge=
... er, I wasn't going to look at it long enuf to decide how old she appeared... at least not at work.
You could've hired me.
There's a PDF of the real journal article available from Nanotechnology's site.
In the article they say that their atomic memory has an energy density of 250 terabits per square inch (compared to 100 gigabits per square inch for a hard drive). A CD-ROM has 14 square inches of recordable area. If one were to use this technique on a surface the size of a CD-ROM, that would give:
(14 square inches) * (250 terabits/square inch) / (8 bits/byte) = 437.5 terabytes
Incredibly huge, but I'm sure there's a number of people who would still be able to fill it up.
I hate it when all the guys bring their girlfriends to the LAN-Parties.
actually all atoms are roughly the same size, hydrogens nucleus has little pull on its electron so the shell is relatively far out from the nucleus, but a massive atom such as uranium has the shell, relatively, closer in, the charges in a stable atom may be equal, but the positive charge is all concentrated in the center and acts on the electrons individually, brining them closer in, but of course if u wanna get weird, all atoms are theoretically infinite (heisenberg)
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
For those who missed it, their 778 gigabyte database of the complete Awari game tree could be stored on a piece of silicon approximately 4mm square. Wait, that's just on one side! Sweet, we'll keep MP3s on the other 778 gig side.
(0.778 terabytes) / ((250 terabits/sq.inch) / (8 bits/byte)) = 0.024896 sq.inch =~ 4mm square
Cos atoms have a habit of moving about.
Deleted
As for the TROLL rating
I was refering to the posts not the ratings.
Call the copyRight police! I just found my latest script embeded in that atomic pattern (photo) - it's backwards & encrypted, but I'm sure it's mine! ...............
- just beacuse you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that the world is NOT out to get ya! -