Scientists create world’s smallest hard drive from just 96 atoms ~ Technology Update

Nanotechnology deals in making or developing materials, devices or structures by manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. It is very diverse. Now, scientists from IBM and German Center for Free-Electron Laser service have invented the world’s smallest hard drive with the help of nanotechnology. Scientists have just used 96 atoms to create data worth one byte. Drives used today at least require half a billion atoms for each byte. It won’t be long when one would find hard drive of the size of rice grains, and music players would be so small that they might fit into your ears. Such tiny hard drives could store information 200 to 300 times compared to those we normally use in our day to day life. The world’s smallest hard drive is built of atoms with the help of Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM). The scientists aligned regular pattern of iron atoms in rows of six atoms each. This might interest you to know that for storing one bit, only two rows are sufficient. Eight pairs of atom rows combine together to form a byte and this uses an area of only 4 by 16 nanometers (a nanometer being a millionth of a millimeter). The world’s smallest hard drive corresponds to a storage density that is hundred times higher when compared to the modern hard drives, as mentioned by Sebastiam, one of the members of CFEL.

A pair of atom rows has two possible magnetic states, which represent the two values 0 and 1 and the data would be written into or read out from the world’s smallest hard drive with the help of Scanning tunneling microscope (STM).

Scanning Tunnelling Microscope, also known as STM sends an electric pulse, which flips the magnetic configuration from one another. The nano magnets are only stable at a frosty temperature of -268 degrees centigrade (Kelvin). The weaker pulse sent from STM reads out the configuration . For the first time, the scientists have managed to deploy a special form of magnetism for data storage purpose and it's known as ant -ferromagnetism. Though scientists expect arrays of some 200 atoms to be stable at room temperature, it will, however; take some time before atomic magnets is used in data storage. The spins of neighboring atoms with anti-ferromagnetic materials aligned oppositely compared to that of conventional hard drives render the material magnetically neutral on the bulk level. This means that anti-ferromagnetic atoms can be spaced much more closely without magnetically interfering with each other and hence, the scientists were able to pack bits only one nanometer apart. This resulted in creation of the World’s Smallest Hard Drive based on nanotechnology.