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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..
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http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/
"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"
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 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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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).
And a brick wall?
Methinks there is no higher density than bit-per-atom.
6.02x10^23 Kb ought to be enough for anyone.
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?