While a great deal of effort goes into increasing storage density, a question much less often addressed is that of how stably data can be stored. Alex Zettl of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues may have found a neat way to handle both with a simple nanomechanical device memory.
They have discovered that a tiny iron particle in a carbon nanotube can be shuttled back and forth electrically to represent a one or a zero – its location being detected by a resistance measurement. Bundles could store up to a terabit per square inch, with a thermodynamic stability of more than a 1000 million years.
Further reading
G E Begtrup et al. 2009 Nano Letters; doi:10.1021/nl803800c.