Scientists discover new mechanism for information storage in one atom | Hacker News Reader

Scientists discover new mechanism for information storage in one atom

phys.org

64 pointshunglee221 comments

Article in Nature Communications: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06337-4

Press release from Radboud University: https://www.ru.nl/english/news-agenda/news/vm/imm/solid-stat...

The phys.org "article" is word-for-word the same as the press release, except that they added a link to an earlier phys.org "article" on a related topic, which in turn was word-for-word the same as this press release: https://actu.epfl.ch/news/a-step-closer-to-single-atom-data-... apart from, again, a link at the bottom to an earlier phys.org "article" which, well, you get the idea.

Actually I don't get the idea - are you saying the whole thing is birds of a feather or that the Nature article is the real deal?

Sorry, I should have been more explicit. I'm saying that every phys.org article is like this: they reproduce a press release without adding anything to it, except for some links to other stuff on phys.org (which in turn are just copies of press releases together with more within-phys.org links).

Cool sci-fi idea would be to try doing this and suddenly discover that there is already some "other" information there.

ooohhhhh that sounds really interesting.

What if we end up corrupting parts of our simulation?

Oh, the system has defenses. You wouldn't want to meet them in a dark alley.

This is part of the plot of the Greg Egan book, Diaspora.

How long can the information stay in it in a stable way? Trusting your information to single atoms sounds quite volatile

Honestly, under ideal conditions probably a while. Outside of that not long would be my guess.

"Scientists at Radboud University discovered a new mechanism for magnetic storage of information in the smallest unit of matter: a single atom."

This press release is aimed at a fairly technically oriented audience, so I'm going to being very precise about why the leading statement in the press release is wrong.

The electron is smaller, more fundamental, more fundamental as a unit, and more fundamental at a higher level of science (is in, electrons are even more fundamental to chemistry than atoms are to physics), than the atom.

First thought I had as well. Aren't quarks matter too?

Given that you'll never see a lone quark (they're physically forbidden - a naked quark is so energetically-unfavorable that attempting to create one would inherently require enough energy to create a second quark to go along with it), and two-quark mesons are both incredibly short-lived (a few nanoseconds at the longest) and act more like force carriers than anything else, then the three-quark baryons - of which protons and neutrons are the only ones that last long enough to care about from an engineering perspective - are the smallest (quark-based) units that could really be called "matter."

Quarks are charged, and thus interact with photons. If reacting with photons is not what you meant by "Given that you'll never see a lone quark", but instead you mean something like, for example, `a single one can be formed as a first order byproduct of a physical interaction`, there is no coherent definition of matter that I am aware of where atoms are the smallest unit, but photons or electrons are not.

edited: updated for precision

There appears to be no universally agreed upon definition of matter. By at least one definition, an atom is indeed the smallest unit.

See my reply to MrEldritch.

This is a feat of enginneering. Not a fundamental discovery of new quantum states as I first assumed.

This sounds incredible. How far away are practical application of it? And would they likely use this Cobalt on a phosphorus substrate or something else entirely?

50% chance this is just another stunt for fame, glory, investments, etc. and nothing useful will come out of it...

Pardon a seemingly stupid question here, but how far away are we from practical realization of Atomic Transistors?

Simple demonstrations of 2 atom transistors have already been done (search for Rydberg blockade rubidium transistors).

Practical applications are very, very far away. A single collision with a molecule of air is plenty to dislodge an atom from any given internal state. Demonstrations are all run in vacuum chambers and rely on control of an atom's internal state.

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