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Stanford's Quantum Hologram Sets Storage Record
eldavojohn writes "It's often assumed that representing data reaches a limit when you get to the point that an atom represents one bit in some form or fashion. But Stanford University researchers have used a quantum hologram model to store the characters 'S' and 'U' by encoding the data at a rate of 35 bits per electron."
And I thought my 8GB USB flash drive was high-density! (20mm x 54mm x 8mm)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Sweet... now they're just a 'T' and 'F' away from writing something useful.
greed@All_Evils:~#
I bet recovering data off an atom could prove...... Difficult. :s
And by letting S=0 and U=1 we can now represent a bit using 70 bits! Oh wai-
They're storing data in a small space, sure, but it's got the same problem that traditional holograms do: it takes a good deal of computation time to figure out how to encode the information you want in wave patterns.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
At least your device is also capable of holding the "B"
One thing most 'futurists' agree on is that the ultimate 'end game' of technology appears to be the conversion of all matter in the solar system into machine parts and computational elements. It's a logical end result of exponential growth. (and, actually, would be only the beginning : such a 'civilization' would eventually grow to convert the entire universe, but this would take much longer due to the snails pace of light)
It's neat to think that such a civilization could store even more information than an obvious cap of '1 bit per atom'.
35 bits per electron?! This kind of resets a few common assumptions about how much data can be stored in matter. Feynman was right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_Plenty_of_Room_at_the_Bottom
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Presumably, then an atom of Carbon-13 could encode the English alphabet, or some trans-uranium element could be used for eight-bit binary data. Radioactive storage anyone?
They're able to squeeze up to 70 bits per electron*!
*Results may vary
It's obvious you can store more than one bit per electron, since electrons can have more than two energy levels.
Why would an atom even naively be the conceptual finest representation of a bit? Does he mean an electron? An atom is quite a large and complex object compared to an electron...Measuring an electron's presence or absence yields a simple bit. There's nothing atomic ABOUT an atom... why would that ever represent a bit?
It sounds very suspect for someone to use 'interference' to store data safely. I'd rather trust my data with an identity thieve: if lost, I could find it on the internet!
New slashdot layout sucks.
Don't be ridiculous. Everyone knows that an atom is 32 bits (but the first three are always zero.)
How many gigaquads does this translate to?
The article didn't go into any detail about this.
Anyone know how many libraries of congress this is?
My god! You're so right! We should like totally stop doing research because it's so hard and takes effort.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
I can store an entire 4 hour porno in/on a single atom and have a few exabytes of data stored directly in my synaptic pathways.
Now all we need to do is shrink a STM so that it fits into a SATA HDD 2.5 or 3.5" form factor :)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
As soon as a version of this is released to the public, I'm going to download music. All of it.
http://pinopsida.com
Read the fine print
"35 bits per electron.*"
1 kilobit=1000 bits
1 bit=1000 bquarks
Goddamn marketers! It's 1024!
I want the most bytes per MOLE next time I shop for a hard disk!
That's gonna make transuran elements pretty valuable - a bit above 1 KB per Plutonium atom then. Also valuable because... it would decay after a while, which in theory could be ideal for top-secret .gov stuff or those "rented" DVDs that destroy themselves.
Though non-radiating atoms are preferable. Like lead - still makes for a nice ~256 byte thing with some ECC/CRC bits or so.
I have not enough atoms to finish this senten
They're going to need a few more bits for the root password.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Was it Greg Bear who explored this in "Blood Music"?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
So what they are really trying to say is "640 atoms should be enough for everybody"?
If they can't recover the data, how did they prove it was ever there? I didn't read the article in good /. fashion, but if it avoids this question I'm sure it's not to be taken seriously.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
The Universe acts as a computer, even though I can't predict what will happen in the next ten seconds I believe my (zero dimentional?) "soul" is a particular instance of a calculation within the Universal calculator.
The word "simulation" implies the calculator and it's calculations have a "higher" purpose, ie: an external intelligence pre-programmed it and/or is still pushing the buttons. Note that by definition the Universe has no "outside".
We will never know if there is a button pushing God, there is simply no way for a temporary calculation to decide what is going on "outside" of the calculator.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Even using Unicode, shouldn't it only take 32 bits to store 2 characters, not 35 ?
Or are the extra 3 bits some kind of error correction code, in case a stray Boson-Higgins comes along and reverses the spin of the electrons ?
No, let me guess, the advent of holographic storage means yet another character encoding to deal with.
Screw that, I want sudo!
RTFM
IANAL, but 'su' 'us', might not be the smartest thing to write, anywhere.
Oooh, this makes me so mad! 35 bits?! They just couldn't go with something like 8 bits allowing for ASCII or 64 allowing for full unicode support? Nooooo, they had to choose frickin' 35 bits! I swear, if I ever meet one of those researchers I'm gonna fucking smack him!
Say 500,000,000 atoms on your fingernail (5 atoms deep)converted @ 35 bits
Appx 2TB per fingernail.
Five nails and you have raid! Where do I sign??
I remember discussing related "small-scale storage" issues with my brother once. Two concepts were of particular interest:
1. Spin and such: If we want to store on a very small scale, why not use the intrinsic properties of molecules, atoms and particles? A simple example would be using a caffeine molecule, which can exist in 8 different molecular arrangements (I forget the exact details - was it aggregate Spin?), as 3-bit memory. I'm sure there are more suitable molecules, or applications on smaller scales, but the concept is sound.
2. Holographic storage: When part of a holographic surface is destroyed or decayed, it does not result in the hologram missing parts, but in a degradation of its overall clarity, since each area of the surface encodes a little of the information about the whole hologram. If storage could be designed around the same concept, data would not be lost unless enough of the whole holograph were destroyed or corrupted.
I particularly like this last idea, but unfortunately I suspect it would only work as permanent - not active - storage, such as read-only media. I think you could only write each bit of the hologram (or equivalent) if you knew what the whole was going to look like.
This study seems to demonstrate the same conceptual problem, although it isn't mentioned. The resultant "picture" could only be constructed by moving atoms around until the interference between their electrons produced the desired pattern. Trying to add to it would require a re-arrangement of the whole structure every time, and such arrangements would increase in complexity exponentially.
Meta will eat itself
Or that electron can't move nearly as fast as a photon?
I hear this is replacing Blu-Ray as the basis for the storage disk for the PS4, which now has an estimated MSRP of $4260285021.99.
Woohoo! Now I can Sudo on an atomic level!!!
I do usually try to take a pragmatist view. It's hard not to, given the number of predictions that have been wildly off, particularly concerning technology over the past few decades.
For some great anecdotal evidence, look in the back of Popular science magazines where they print headlines from 25-75 years ago. There are doom and gloom ones (e.g. predicting '1984' type of developments) and overly optimistic (e.g., 'by 2000, we won't have to do housework because robots will be doing it for us'). I find that the truth is almost universally between the two extremes.
I also find that this view works extremely well when applied to the economy and politics as well (as in, Bush is not the devil incarnate in spite of numerous bad decisions, and Obama is not going to turn the nation into a socialist welfare state where we pay 60%+ in taxes -- nor is he going to fix our problems in the first 100 days of his presidency).
This view is especially helpful in light of discussions concerning exponential growth. It is easy to show trends that have continued for the past X years and then conclude that since numbers don't lie, this will continue for the next Y years. These arguments are easy to demonstrate and harder to refute (meaning it takes less technical knowledge to make them than to disprove them), making them widely used in persuasion.
From TFA:
A lot like William Shatner currently does, I would imagine.
This ain't rocket surgery.
there's a typo in your sig.
Really? The "spell" command agrees with all the words except "Weimar" and that's the correct spelling. (It's a German city name, so it hasn't been sufficiently incorporated into American English to count as a word for spell checkers.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's 35 bits per electron and a bunch of strategically placed CO molecules.
The information is encoded in the placement of the molecules. The electrons are merely the tool for extracting that information. It's like saying the needle of a record player is capable of storing an entire symphony.
eom
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
"It's often assumed that representing data reaches a limit when you get to the point that an atom represents one bit in some form or fashion.
Why would you assume that? Sub-atomically organized memory has been around for almost as long as Sci-Fi.