Researchers in the US have demonstrated experimental “memory” with a theoretical density of 1 trillion bits per square inch and a storage lifetime of more than a billion years.

The research team led by physicist Alex Zettl at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley built their memory prototype out of a nanoparticle of iron routed through a carbon nanotube like a shuttle.

The iron particle, 1/50,000th the width of a human hair, moves about the carbon nanotube through the application of a current applied to the nanotube. Scientists postulate that the position of the shuttle relative to the midpoint of the tube could represent binary states, and that these states could be read by measuring the resistance to voltage applied axially to the carbon nanotube.

Suspending the nanoparticle within the carbon nanotube by removing the positioning charge locks in a binary state that would take 3.3×10¹⁷ seconds to significantly decay. Meanwhile, other numbers show the diminutive size of this technology could be used to achieve 116GB/in² storage density.

The experiment has been presented in an article entitled Nanoscale Reversible Mass Transport for Archival Memory in the Nano Letters publication

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