I believe another difficulty for this form of storage is that the temperature must be kept extremely low to keep the placed atoms from jumping all over the place. I also find it incredible that the metal surface appears to be so smooth at this level of detail. Any idea what you would see if you placed one new copper atom upon the surface? Unless they intentionally moved all the excess ones off the now smooth surface, then it appears that any new ones would be absorbed into the surface.
It would be interesting to see how a gas atom behaves if placed upon this surface as well. Would oxygen get attached to the nearest copper and freeze in place or would it freely exchange locations like the more inert carbon? Then, of course I found it interesting that the carbon atoms seem to run into each other without forming a bond. Does that suggest that the carbon copper bond is more powerful than a carbon pair? One last question: How deep would a carbon nano sphere dig into the surface? There is a great deal of exciting work being done at these sizes and it is apparent that many new useful discoveries will result. Storage in DNA might become important one day provided that it can be sped up and that a much better system does not come first. Life has found it to be useful and it has the advantage of billions of years of evolution. Perhaps life would have found one of the better ways had it been able to operate at higher energy levels. Fortunately we do have this luxury. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> To: vortex-l <vortex-l@eskimo.com> Sent: Thu, May 2, 2013 10:51 am Subject: Re: [Vo]:IBM Stop Motion Film of Cu Atoms Come to think of it, this means that in principle IBM could store data at one bit per atom starting now. Perhaps the biggest difficulty would be finding the data again. I guess this is the lower limit to data storage. I doubt that subatomic storage will ever be possible. Probably, archival storage in DNA will become practical before storage in individual atoms does. As I mentioned before, all of the data in world would fit into roughly 6 ml of DNA. A prof. at Harvard has stored and reproduced data in DNA -- a copy of his own textbook. The techniques are too slow and expensive to be competitive today. I believe they are derived from technology used in the human genome project. An unexpected spin-off. - Jed
