Single Molecule Memory

techtrend linked us up to a paper from Mark Reed and James Tour on single molecule memory which, if it comes about will pretty much make space irrelevant. They say the technology is 3-5 years off.

Comments

It doesn't say '3-5 years off'

[Nathaniel]

It simply talks about the concept, and says "Papers presented at the International Electron Devices Meeting ... give important clues about where electronics technology will be three-to-five years from now."

But nothing in the article says that anything in this particular paper will be implimented any time soon.

skeptical

[Forward The Light Br]

this would be cool, except:

we still dont have a decent way to transfer information through 1 molecule sized pathways...
(keep in mind, they have flipped the gate, and watched with a microscope... they did not do anything useful with it)

the gate/transistor can be that small, but if the path to get there is not, who cares

(electricity can't work well at that size, if the pathways are that small and at all decently near each other you will get massive electron tunneling, where they hop over to the next pathway ) (this is bad ;-)

optical pathways ahve not been gotten to work yet AFAIK, and even they would have problems at that level

on a more holistic level, fusion was supposed to be done 20 years ago, those incredibly large harddrives that are the size of my pinky were supposed to be done by now....


this is cool and all, but it is research that will not bear fruit for a LOOONG time

-RS
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars --Oscar Wilde

James Tour

[fremen]

You can see what the Tour research group is up to at Rice by going to his homepage at http://www.jmtour.com/. There is information about this project at http://www.jmtour.com/info.htm. Scroll down the page a bit.

Finally, don't forget that you can see more about the Rice nanotechnology program at The Rice Quantum Institute and The Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology. Don't forget that Rice is where the Buckyball craze started, with Smalley and Curl winning the Nobel for the discovery of its shape.

Possible explanation on how it works

[Enoch Root]

If I am not mistaken, this is no different from how quantum logic computers would work. Two years ago, a computer/physics specialist gave a lecture at our physics department on how to store memory using only an atom or molecule per bit.

Quite simply, you use the spin of a single electron to determine whether you have a 0 ('down' spin) or 1 ('up' spin) for that given atom. These are read with lasers, and I believe this can be done rather quickly.

If this is the same thing, then the theory has existed for maybe three years, but they seem to have found a practical application for it. Before that, all they could do was use some sort of awkward prototype filled with lens for interferometry.

If this is indeed the same thing, it also leads to a spiffy thing: fuzzy logic. Since quantum mechanics is essentially a matter of statistics, it means an electron may be in a probabilistic state between 0 and 1. For instance, it could be:

1/Sqrt(2)|+> + 1/Sqrt(2)|->

How this can lead to more efficient calculations, I have no clue. Still, it's cool to think of a single bit as "maybe 0 but most probably 1".

Again, not sure if this is the same technology. It may just not be; but regardless, the idea remains a really cool one.

"Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"