5 ms·

Tbh, I think that in the near future we'll figure how to flip one bit worth of information in a single atom, perhaps with a high precision magnetic field, and u

Tbh, I think that in the near future we'll figure how to flip one bit worth of information in a single atom, perhaps with a high precision magnetic field, and use crystals to store amounts of data we don't have prefixes for yet.

minitoar 6y ago
Doubtful this is useful because it’s just not enough mass to be stable.
- smaddox 6y ago
  Not anywhere near room temperature, anyways. Plus it's not particularly helpful to store data in a single atom when it takes a much larger device to read the data. NAND flash cells are already about as small as they can be, but now they're being stacked on top of each other for better density. This is a much more promising avenue. Holographic storage also leverages the third dimension for huge increase in density compared to traditional optical drives.
- frongpik 6y ago
  What do you mean? I thought atoms in crystals are well localized and only oscillate around their average grid position.
  - minitoar 6y ago
    I mean that noise in the environment will interfere with the state of your atoms too easily.
    - frongpik 6y ago
      The state I was thinking about is stable electron configuration. If an atom has two such configurations, and can switch between them, that's one bit worth of storage.
      - minitoar 6y ago
        And what if a stray photon should strike your atom? Does that not have a chance of changing the state? I don’t know much about electron configurations.
        frongpik 6y ago
        I suppose a random photon won't have the right energy to switch the state. But even when this happens, we have error recovery algorithms: cells in regular hard disks die all the time.
        lazide 6y ago
        A single atomic electron state will almost certainly switch to a problematic degree except for very exceptional materials in typical room temperature type conditions - free ozone, UV light, background radiation. most crystals will grow or change at room temperature in some way over time (normalizing to the lower energy state if they weren’t 100% already, or high energy perturbances like UV light damaging the matrix and then ‘falling down’ the energy ladder again). Diamonds ablate through oxidation as well. Error correcting helps of course, but we already have to do a LOT of error correcting to make even the ‘low density’ spinning rust drives we have now work. At some point you have so much noise, your error correction overhead is too high to make it worthwhile - which is the current issue with high q-bit quantum computers for instance We’re a long way from having the materials science to be able to do this. Same issues plague quantum computing. Maybe some day though?
        frongpik 6y ago
        MRI machines do something like this. Probably not at the atom scale accuracy. UV light can be ignored because the crystal would sit in a opaque case. A trivial error correction is writing a bit to many places, the idea similar to bloom filters.
        lazide 6y ago

minitoar 6y ago

Doubtful this is useful because it’s just not enough mass to be stable.

smaddox 6y ago
Not anywhere near room temperature, anyways. Plus it's not particularly helpful to store data in a single atom when it takes a much larger device to read the data. NAND flash cells are already about as small as they can be, but now they're being stacked on top of each other for better density. This is a much more promising avenue. Holographic storage also leverages the third dimension for huge increase in density compared to traditional optical drives.
frongpik 6y ago
What do you mean? I thought atoms in crystals are well localized and only oscillate around their average grid position.
- minitoar 6y ago
  I mean that noise in the environment will interfere with the state of your atoms too easily.
  - frongpik 6y ago
    The state I was thinking about is stable electron configuration. If an atom has two such configurations, and can switch between them, that's one bit worth of storage.
    - minitoar 6y ago
      And what if a stray photon should strike your atom? Does that not have a chance of changing the state? I don’t know much about electron configurations.
      - frongpik 6y ago
        I suppose a random photon won't have the right energy to switch the state. But even when this happens, we have error recovery algorithms: cells in regular hard disks die all the time.
        lazide 6y ago
        A single atomic electron state will almost certainly switch to a problematic degree except for very exceptional materials in typical room temperature type conditions - free ozone, UV light, background radiation. most crystals will grow or change at room temperature in some way over time (normalizing to the lower energy state if they weren’t 100% already, or high energy perturbances like UV light damaging the matrix and then ‘falling down’ the energy ladder again). Diamonds ablate through oxidation as well. Error correcting helps of course, but we already have to do a LOT of error correcting to make even the ‘low density’ spinning rust drives we have now work. At some point you have so much noise, your error correction overhead is too high to make it worthwhile - which is the current issue with high q-bit quantum computers for instance We’re a long way from having the materials science to be able to do this. Same issues plague quantum computing. Maybe some day though?
        frongpik 6y ago
        MRI machines do something like this. Probably not at the atom scale accuracy. UV light can be ignored because the crystal would sit in a opaque case. A trivial error correction is writing a bit to many places, the idea similar to bloom filters.
        lazide 6y ago