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By manipulating a cloud of electrons to create a hologram, a team of Stanford University has managed to enter two letters in a volume smaller than an atom. An exploit laboratory opens up new prospects in the long term.

The smallest memory of the world covers an area roughly 0.3 square off nanometer on the surface of a copper coin. And it contains two letters ... It reads - with sophisticated - an S and U, for Stanford University. It is in the University of California, a team of researchers (Christopher Moon, Laila Mattos, Brian Foster, Gabriel Zeltzer and Hari Manoharan) has managed this feat, based on the use of a scanning tunneling microscope. This instrument consists of an extremely fine metal tip that is moving at very close range of a surface can also be used to move atoms. In 1989, a team of IBM had included the three letters of the company with 35 xenon atoms on a surface nickel. Each of the letters was four times larger than the memory of the Stanford team.

Therefore, the subatomic level that the information was recorded. To achieve this, researchers had to manipulate the electrons themselves. They also used a scanning tunneling microscope to move molecules of carbon monoxide on a copper surface. These, by their very presence, causing waves in the electron cloud of atoms of copper. Similar compression wave produced by moving a stone in water, but governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, they generate patterns in the cloud, which can be converted into hologram with a little tact.

20 bits per square nanometer :

The Stanford team has achieved in this way, precisely controlling the position of molecules of carbon monoxide, create grounds provided in advance and therefore to store information. It is a hologram in the sense that the information is supported by an arrangement of physical structures. But here it is two-dimensional, on the surface of copper, unlike a conventional hologram three dimensions. He did not play with light, but with all the electrons from the surface of copper, using, as for writing, scanning tunneling microscope.

Published in Nature Nanotechnology, these results are well beyond the current record. Many still seek to make submissions to a single electron (SEM, for single electron memory, in English). End 2008, a qubit (a quantum bit computer) had been recorded in the nucleus of an atom.

By registering these two letters, the researchers explain have reached a storage capacity of 35 bits per electron or, in other words, a density of 20 bits per square nanometer! Of course, this is the moment to work at the laboratory level and it is far, far away, an application, which, moreover, will perhaps especially the computer Quantum still hypothetical.