5 ms·

447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

• deleted 6mo ago
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• jmyeet 6mo ago
  Yeah, I've been baited by "breakthroughs" in storage technology for almost 40 years at this point [1]. I'll believe it when it's in Best Buy. Battery "breakthroughs" have really taken up the mantle of headline-grabbing research fund-raising articles so it's nice to see a throwback to the OG: storage. [1]: https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1991/06/23/holograms-the-next-computer-memory-boost/ https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1991/06/23/holograms-the-ne...
  • XorNot 6mo ago
    I mean battery breakthroughs are real though? BYD is now demoing 0-80% in 5 mins on production vehicles in China. The price of the 50kwh unit I had put into my house was very low. Sodium ion is ramping up too but is commercially available. That straight wasn't possible a few years ago till the electrode breakthroughs.
    • golem14 6mo ago
      Do you have any pointers on said 50kWh battery? Asking for a friend.
      • XorNot 6mo ago
        This was the group who did it for me in Australia: https://voltxenergy.com.au/ https://voltxenergy.com.au/ It was under subsidy, but I got about double what I was going to get about 6 months prior. There are 50kwh units going on AliExpress for about $12k AUD outright so I think there's been another step down in per-cell costs which is tickling through. I'm waiting for a price cut to make outright purchases a bit more affordable but with a wholesale electricity service plan adding another say 100kWh probably works out.
        • golem14 6mo ago
          Yeah, unfortunately shipping anything with Li-Ion to my friend is pretty tough. Especially anything larger than a power bank. Amazon isn't even shipping those. I have hopes for Sodium-Ion cells, they should be way more shippable and presumably a better fit for residential power.
  • anigbrowl 6mo ago
    I am about the same age and tarted loading programs off cassette tapes. The fact that I can get a terabyte of storage in a micro SD card the size of my pinkie nail for under $200 still impresses me.
  • timcobb 6mo ago
    This is research...
    • jmyeet 6mo ago
      It's always "research". I put that in quotes because any press like this isn't really "research", it's "fund-raising". It's the academic game of getting papers into the right publications, getting "street cred" by getting the right heavyweights as co-authors and to cite you, to become a "heavyweight" by doing the same thing and ultimately getting more grants to perpetuate the cycle. Research can be interesting but so often none of it goes anywhere, it's just hype and there's a reproducibility crisis in academia. Look at the decades wasted on academic fraud and appeals to authority with Alzheimer's research [1]. Most of this media is the academic equivalent of "dcotors HATE This guy". [1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12397490/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12397490/
      • cluckindan 6mo ago
        Do you think it’s logically sound to marry the ”no true Scotsman” to a strawman argument? Or, to imply guilt by association by first constructing a false stereotype of research in one field, and then applying it onto an instance of research in another field?
• mkprc 6mo ago
  Sniff test: a paper with a single author and 53 revisions, listing a gmail address as contact information despite the author, after a brief internet search, appearing to have affiliations with CSU Global, (maybe) the University of Central Florida, and the San Jose State University Department of Aerospace.
  • iliatoli 6mo ago
    Author here. Three PhDs (Mathematics, Pisa; Quantum Chemistry, UCF; Materials Science, UTD — in progress), plus MS degrees from SJSU and CSU. The gmail is because this is independent work, not affiliated with any institution. v53 reflects thirteen years of development since the original 2013 publication (Graphene 1, 107–109). The barrier is verified at two independent levels of theory with a confirmed transition state. Happy to discuss the physics.
    • _alternator_ 6mo ago
      Have you considered subjecting this to expert scrutiny by submitting to a journal? That's probably better than getting hot takes on HN by random technology enthusiasts, skeptics, anon experts, and trolls.
      • iliatoli 6mo ago
        It's under peer review at Physica Scripta (IOP) since March 25. HN is for visibility, not validation.
        • GTP 6mo ago
          It would be interesting to hear back after this passes peer review.
      • tux3 6mo ago
        Realistically I don't see how this could be submitted to a journal as-is. I'm sure you could take this material and write a couple papers out of it, but right now this is a 60 page word document with commentary on a variety of topics from memory market economics to quantum computing. It's full of self-congratulatory language like "The transition is not an incremental improvement within the existing paradigm; it obsoletes the paradigm and the infrastructure built around it". Alright, I'm happy to believe that this work is important. But this is not the neutral tone of a scientific article, it reads like ad copy for a new technology. I'm sure there's interesting physics in there, but it needs a serious editing effort before it could be taken seriously by a journal.
• YasuoTanaka 6mo ago
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• aperrien 6mo ago
  Remarkable. If this material works and is flexible enough, we could someday see tape drives with hundreds of exabytes of capacity.
  • iliatoli 6mo ago
    Author here. The paper describes exactly this — a nanotape spool architecture with volumetric density of 0.4–9 ZB/cm³. Section 4.4 in the preprint.
• est 6mo ago
  Perhaps title had a typo? fluorographane -> Fluorographene Can't find a single page about fluorographane https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=fluorographane&title=Special:Search&fulltext=1&ns0=1 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=fluorographane&t... But this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorographene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorographene
  • iliatoli 6mo ago
    Not a typo. Fluorographene is the sp² form (Nair et al. 2010). Fluorographane uses the -ane suffix to denote full sp³ saturation — same convention as graphene → graphane. The sp³ hybridization is what creates the bistable C-F orientation that stores the bit.
    • est 6mo ago
      TIL thanks!
  • gnabgib 6mo ago
    Fluorographane: Synthesis and Properties (pdf)https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/getauthorversionpdf/C4CC08844A https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/getauthorversionpdf/C4CC0884...
• Animats 6mo ago
  "A scanning-probe prototype already constitutes a functional non-volatile memory device with areal density exceeding all existing technologies by more than five orders of magnitude." Does that mean a scanning tunneling microscope is the I/O mechanism? That's been demoed for atom-level storage in the past. But it's too slow for use.
  • iliatoli 6mo ago
    Yes, Tier 1 is scanning probe — C-AFM specifically. Slow but sufficient for proof of concept. The paper describes a Tier 2 architecture using near-field mid-IR arrays for parallel read/write, projecting 25 PB/s aggregate throughput. Tier 1 proves the physics. Tier 2 is the engineering path to speed.
    • ilaksh 6mo ago
      What do you need to build a demo of Tier 2? I am guessing if you can do that then you can get an investor.
      • iliatoli 6mo ago
        Tier 2 requires near-field infrared optics at sub-10 nm resolution — that's active research in several groups but not commercially available yet. The immediate next step is Tier 1: one C-AFM image proving the read, one voltage pulse proving the write. That's $300 in materials and access to an AFM. Already in progress with a collaborator.
        • Keyframe 6mo ago
          at that level (Tier 2) we're basically talking plasmonics, right? optics + antenna theory for the uninitiated. SPR, quantum plasmonics, active nanophotonics.. that's some advance shit from the (hopefully near) future, man. This is mostly in semiconductor research now, right? maybe biology?
          • 6mo ago
• dlev_pika 6mo ago
  The Now I Get non-technical version, because I need someone to explain this to me x) https://nowigetit.us/pages/d7f94fd0-e608-47f9-8805-4298981059a8.html https://nowigetit.us/pages/d7f94fd0-e608-47f9-8805-429898105...
• dgfl 6mo ago
  This is a pipe dream and I’m almost tempted to say a fever dream. The chemistry part seems somewhat sound, even though that’s outside of my field of expertise. But the entire readout process is questionable, and has clear signs of heavy AI writing. The AFM mechanism described as “tier 1” (very strong LLMism, btw) is somewhat optimistic but realistic. The fields needed are large compared to usual values in solid state devices, but I’d guess achievable with an AFM. But “tier 2” is vague and completely speculative. Some random things I noted: - handwaving that (not exact quote) “the read controller is cached. No need to read the same bit twice”. Cached with what?? If this miraculous technology can achieve 25 PB/s, what can possibly hope to cache it? More generally, it’s a strange thing to point out. - some magic and completely handwaved MEMS array that converts an 8um spot size laser beam into atomic-resolution 2D addressing? In my opinion this is the biggest sin of the manuscript. What I understood to be depicted is just fundamentally physically impossible. - a general misunderstanding of integrated electronics, and dishonest benchmarking, comparing real memory technologies being sold at scale right now, vs theoretical physical bounds on an untested idea. Also no mention of existing magnetic tape as far as I can tell. - constantly pulling out specific numbers or estimates with no citation and insufficient justification. Too many examples to even count. I’m sorry for the harsh language, I wouldn’t use it for a usual review. But in my opinion this needs a very heavy toning down and complete rewrite, and is unfit for a proper review. Final remark: electronics is, and will always fundamentally be, intrinsically denser than optics. Some techniques “described” here, if they were possible, would have been applied to existing optical tech (i.e. phase change materials in blue-ray).
  • deleted 6mo ago
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  • cynicalkane 6mo ago
    Yes, this paper is insane. The actual quote about caching is: > Once a region of tape has been read, the controller stores the result. Subsequent operations reference the cache rather than re-interrogating the physical medium. Re-reading a known bit is unnecessary; the controller already holds its state However, earlier, the paper claims: > The transformer architectures underpin- ning modern large language models are bandwidth-limited, not compute-limited [1–3]. The energy consumed moving data between DRAM, NAND flash, and processor cache already exceeds the energy consumed by arithmetic in datacenter AI accelerators [2]. This is not an optimization problem. It is a materials problem [emphasis mine]. as part of a longer rant about the AI "memory wall" in the very first section. If we open with a long spiel about how memory is expensive in material cost and energy cost and this material is a solution for that then what are we caching the read in? On that note, what kind of computer engineer thinks about cache on the order of individual bits on a medium? And, as you point out, 25 PB/s is a lot. Around 1000x that of a typical on-die SRAM cache, I think. A while later, the author speaks of using atomic force microscopy to read the data back. The size of AFM scans are, in practice, as I understand, along the order of square micrometers. I think this whole paper is an AI-driven, as you put it, 'fever dream', enabling an author to put forth 60 pages of sciencey claims and sciencey math without -- as far as I can tell -- any concrete and novel scientific result of any kind. AI-driven reality warps are not new; the difference is nowdays AIs are good enough at sounding smart to get past the barriers of a typical smart person who might want to be fooled or make a show of being open-minded. Later on, the author proposes using "shaped femtosecond IR pulses" -- without further elaboration -- to address single atoms! IR wavelengths are on the order of a micrometer at minimum!
• MrEldritch 6mo ago
  The concept is interesting, but I'm getting a lot of red flags from this - there's no experimental data or proof-of-concept work at all, which makes this feel more like a blue-sky "Look what we could do if we could arrange atoms however we wanted!" pipe dream in the Drexlerian mode. Something about the writing style's also pinging my LLM radar, which while not disqualifying in-and-of-itself is very discouraging in combination with the other funkiness. The chemistry and manufacturability strike me as questionable in particular, and I'm not convinced the physics of reading and writing are nearly as clean as the author seems to think. (I'm also unclear how the bit is supposed to actually flip under the applied electric charge without the fluorine and carbon having to pass through each other.)
  • iliatoli 6mo ago
    The fluorine doesn't pass through carbon. It passes between two neighboring carbons through a C-C gap of 2.64 Å at the transition state. This is pyramidal inversion — the same mechanism as ammonia (NH₃), but with a 4.6 eV barrier instead of 0.25 eV. The transition state geometry is computed and verified with one imaginary frequency.
    • gus_massa 6mo ago
      > with one imaginary frequency Technical note, because it's jargon: "Real" means position = A * sin(w * t) "Imaginary" means position = A * expt(w * t) (because expt(w * i * t) = cos(w * t) + i * sin(w * t)) If you calculate in a computer an ammonia molecule with all the atom is a plane z = 0 (instead of the usual piramidal shape), then the N in the center is in an inestable equilibrium and the N does not make small vibrations like z = expt(w * t). It makes a big "imaginary" vibration like z = expt(w * t) that is exponential for a short time while z is almost 0, and then the approximations don't apply and it reach the z of the usual shape at equilibrium.
• next_xibalba 6mo ago
  Too long, not gonna read. When do I get my 447TB iPhone?
• cluckindan 6mo ago
  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as proven by the number of comments treating the paper as an AI slop pipe dream.
• bastawhiz 6mo ago
  Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes. Demonstrating this stuff is possible isn't the hard part, it seems. Productionizing it is. You have to have exceedingly fast read and write speeds: who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it, or if you produce data faster than you can write it? It has to be durable under adverse conditions. It has to be practical to manufacture the medium and the drives. You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write. By the time most of these problems are worked out, most of these technologies aren't a whole lot better than existing tech. Stick this on the "Wouldn't it be nice if graphene..." pile.
  • storus 6mo ago
    Aren't lasers driving the current 32TB+ HDD tech?
    • serf 6mo ago
      yeah but that wasn't a straight upgrade, either. HAMR has all sorts of tradeoffs.
  • s0rce 6mo ago
    Basically you just ignore the hyped up press releases, this just accompanies most semi-cool/exciting papers. The scientists probably know this isn't going to be some new storage that will become widespread but its just part of the game to sell the story like this and the administration wants this.
  • loneboat 6mo ago
    > who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it To be fair, if I'm reading an exabyte in a month, my hardware's pushing >3 Tbps, which I'd be very happy with.
    • Firerouge 6mo ago
      Plus just put 32 in stripping RAID if you really need to read an exabyte a day
• johnwhitman 6mo ago
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• imaginacion3D 6mo ago
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• olakamar 6mo ago
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• d--b 6mo ago
  I don’t understand the comments here. They say in the last paragraph: > A scanning-probe prototype already constitutes a functional non-volatile memory device with areal density exceeding all existing technologies by more than five orders of magnitude. Are we supposed to read all these stories as lies? Now it doesn’t say that this is easy to produce, but if those claims are true, it doesn’t really matter if it is very expensive. It doesn’t say either if the stuff can withstand live conditions. It’s annoying not to be able to trust whether solutions like these are viable or not.
  • iliatoli 6mo ago
    The scanning-probe claim is real — C-AFM on fluorographane is achievable with existing commercial instruments. The paper is a computational prediction with a detailed experimental protocol. An experimental collaborator is preparing the validation now. The 'live conditions' question is addressed in Section 5 (radiation hardness, mechanical damage, defect physics).
  • rcxdude 6mo ago
    By itself the density of such a system would just be an interesting superlative: the paper itself references people who have achieved similar densities in the lab, but it's not necessarily useful if the read and write are slow and the total addressable area is miniscule: both things I would expect from the described proof-of-concept (the main point of which would be to demonstrate that the storage works at all, and maybe to evaluate its robustness to some degree). You should not expect that even the best of ideas at this stage are going to turn into products on any reasonable timescale, this is at a super early level of development and there are probable more things that can go wrong than you are imagining. But the paper shows there has been a good amount of effort at this stage to evaluate the robustness of the storage: the whole reason for this particular arrangement seems to be that it's pretty robust while still being writable. (though anything nanoscale is not something you're going to be able to handle directly)
• dazhbog 6mo ago
  Looks interesting but cant take it seriously when there are so many red flags of LLM style writing. The author continues to use AI to even reply to comments in this thread. (its not X its Y, Em Dashes, etc.)
  • gyb997 6mo ago
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• unit149 6mo ago
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• Rahulghoti 6mo ago
  This is like making the big companies lose their profit money since they still have their old products in their warehouses why would they want this tech to come that's why it never materializes
• adam_patarino 6mo ago
  Fluorographane is that stuff in factorio space age, no?
• ethmarks 6mo ago
  Pardon my ignorance, but why does the "447 TB/cm^2" density value use square centimeters instead of a volume unit? Does the information capacity of this material really scale in proportion to area? How? Or is it just a typo?
  • iliatoli 6mo ago
    fluorographane is a single atomic layer — one carbon thick — so storage density is naturally per unit area. The paper also gives volumetric density for the nanotape spool architecture (0.4–9 ZB/cm³, Section 4.4).