IBM makes storage breakthrough

data, Computerworld reports.

The breakthrough may someday allow data storage hardware manufacturers to produce storage products with capacities that are orders of magnitude greater than today's hard disk and flash drives.

The Sydney Morning Herald says the findings could help lead to a new class of nano materials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities than the current silicon-based computers, but will also consume significantly less power. And it may offer a new direction for research in quantum computing.

The group at IBM's Almaden Research Centre, in California, led by Dr Andreas Heinrich, have created the smallest possible unit of magnetic storage by painstakingly arranging two rows of six iron atoms on a surface of copper nitrite atoms.

The cluster of atoms is described as anti-ferromagnetic - a rare quality in which each atom in the array has an opposed magnetic orientation.

In theory, such atoms could be assembled into Qbits - the basic unit of an experimental approach to computing that might one day exceed the capabilities of today's most powerful supercomputers, The New York Times states.

“If you do this with two atoms, then they behave more like a quantum mechanical object,” explains Heinrich. “This is why science is interested in this work more than the technology.”