Graphene Could Make Magnetic Memory 1000x Denser

KentuckyFC writes "The density of magnetic memory depends on the size of the magnetic domains used to store bits. The current state-of-the-art uses cobalt-based grains some 8nm across, each containing about 50,000 atoms. Materials scientists think they can shrink the grains to 15,000 atoms but any smaller than that and the crystal structure of the grains is lost. That's a problem because the cobalt has to be arranged in a hexagonal close packing structure to ensure the stability of its magnetic field. Otherwise the field can spontaneously reverse and the data is lost. Now a group of German physicists say they can trick a pair of cobalt atoms into thinking they are in a hexagonal close packing structure by bonding them to a hexagonal carbon ring such as graphene or benzene. That's handy because the magnetic field associated with cobalt dimers is calculated to be far more stable than the field in a cobalt grain. And graphene and benzene rings are only 0.5 nm across, a size that could allow an increase in memory density of three orders of magnitude."

Comments

Re:More room but----

[AliasMarlowe]

So one day the atoms might just realize that they've been tricked and you'll end up with your computer on fire because your benzene chains have all broken and you end up with 2-methyl-1,3,5-trinitrobenzene

Actually, the explosive yield is greater if you omit the methyl group. Trinitrobenzene out-booms trinitrotoluene, but is harder to handle due to its lower stability.

Re:Not again!

[afidel]

No problems here, we have two of each generation of tape drive (prod+dr) and when we upgrade we retire them into storage instead of throwing them into the landfill. If our drives were inoperable or we couldn't get them hooked up easily there are companies out there that specialize in retrieval from tape. Beyond that the failure rate for LTO in my experience is vanishingly low, we put over 100 tapes a month through our libraries and I think we've had two failed tapes in the last 3 years and one of those was dropped on its edge so completely understandable. All our tapes go through verification on a different drive than wrote them and we do test restores both at prod and DR. My experience with DLT was almost as good. If you use anything cheaper than DLT then you aren't really using tape meant to be reliable IMHO. The farthest back we have been asked to go was 15 years for documents related to property taxes which can apparently be refiled for up to 20 years in some jurisdiction, no problem recovering the DLT tapes (well, there were filesystem and format problems, but nothing related to the tapes and even those were fairly easily overcome).