Just the size of an atom, this will be the smallest hard drive in the world

IBM officially entered the "miniature" electronic game world with the ambition to create the world's smallest hard drive.

Data storage technology strives to create products with smaller sizes. And recently, scientists have taken an amazing "leap" with the project to create a nanoscale hard drive using an atom.

This atom will be magnetized and cooled by liquid helium and stored in an extreme vacuum. In this way, the team stored a bit of data (1 or 0) in extremely small space.

Data storage technology strives to create products with smaller sizes.

And even though the capacity is not too large, the IBM team in Californiacho knows that this development is extremely potential to create a credit card-sized drive that can hold about 30 million songs in all. in iTunes or Spotify library.

Researcher Christopher Lutz added: "We conducted this experiment to better understand what would happen if we compressed the technology data to a minimum, just one atom." .

The team used tunneling scanning microscope (STM) - a Nobel Prize-winning invention in research. This is a type of non-optical microscope, used to observe the surface morphology of a solid that works based on the recording of an electron's tunnel flow using a scanning probe on the sample surface. STM is a powerful tool to observe the surface structure of solid objects with an atomic resolution.

In the extreme vacuum environment inside the STM, without any air molecules and other types of pollution, scientists were able to effectively control a holmium atom.

Besides, this microscope also helps to cool liquid helium gas, an important part in increasing the stability of the reading and writing process. Thanks to a carefully controlled environment, the team was able to read and write exactly two atoms that carry electrons separated by only 1 nanometer - equal to 1 million of the width of a conventional needle tip.

Also with this microscope, scientists can mimic the operation of a conventional hard drive, providing an electric current that redirects the magnetism of an atom up or down but on a much smaller scale.

Cutting down to just one atom is truly an extraordinary step.

Today, a hard drive usually needs 100,000 atoms to store only 1 bit. Therefore, cutting down to just one atom is truly an extraordinary step.

The team is excited to say that the technique could create drives that are 1,000 times larger than the drive we have. And although the process is still too difficult and expensive to release to the market in the near future, researchers have seen its feasibility in its first efforts.

This is only the latest in a series of data storage initiatives - earlier this month, researchers from Columbia University claimed they had backed up 6 digital files into a single DNA. According to IBM's research team, although there have been many studies to store data in single atoms, this is the smallest, stable and most desirable result.

The researchers concluded: "High magnetic stability combined with reading and writing electromagnetic shows that storing in an atom is perfectly expected".

This study was published in the journal Nature.