Scientists at the University of Redbud have discovered a new mechanism for magnetic storage of information in the smallest unit of matter: one atom. Although the proof of principle has been demonstrated at very low temperatures, this mechanism promises to function at room temperature. Thus, it will be possible to store thousands of times more information than it is now on hard drives. The results of the work were published in Nature Communications.
When you go to the level of one atom, magnetic atoms become unstable. “The permanent magnet detects the presence of the north and south poles, which remain in the same orientation,” says Professor Alexander Khacheturyan. “But when you get to one atom, the north and south poles of the atom begin to change and do not know which direction to point, because they become extremely sensitive to their surroundings. If you want information to be stored in a magnetic atom, it should not rush about. For the past ten years, scientists have wondered how many atoms are needed to stabilize a magnet so that an atom stops vibrating, and how long can information be stored in it before the atom spins again? Over the past two years, scientists at Lausanne and IBM have figured out how to keep an atom from flipping over and have shownthat one atom can act as memory. To do this, they had to use very low temperatures - 233 degrees Celsius. This severely limits the use of technology."
A new approach to storing information in the atom
Researchers at Redbud University have taken a different approach. Choosing a special substrate - semiconductor black phosphorus - they discovered a new way of storing information in individual cobalt atoms, which solves the traditional problems of instability. Using a scanning tunneling microscope, when a sharp metal probe is moved across the surface just a few atoms apart, they “saw” single cobalt atoms on the surface of black phosphorus. They were also able to show directly that individual cobalt atoms can be manipulated by injecting them into one of two bit states.
Ilya Khel