Capture and catch more ‘Pokemon’ ----- Atomic Memory
Pokemon Go, a well-known and long-awaiting game for people worldwide. Yet, on the first of launching, the sever of was down due to the massive data storage from players globally. But using atomic memory could ease the problem and no necessary to close the sever.
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What is atomic memory?
For traditional hard disks used in severs are crystal-based, the coarseness of crystal is the main factor to the storage capacity. Each single crystal can record a 0 or 1 signal. The smallest crystal in the latest hard disks still consists of a thousand of atom. Then, if the hard disk change to use atoms to record the 0 and 1 signal, the storage capacity must increase. Recently, the development of atomic memory with reference to a recent research shows the drastically increase by 500 times.
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How atom can be arranged in the pattern that show 0 and 1 signal?
The base of the atom memory disk is crystalline copper metal and the atom for ‘storage’ are chlorine atoms form evaporated copper(II) chloride powder. The chlorine atoms deposited onto crystalline copper and forms a sub-monolayer of single atoms with regular patterns.
This process only occurs under ultrahigh vacuum and ultra-low temperature under 79K in this stage. The reason behind is air contains impurities which deposit on the copper and damage the magnetic reader together with the regular pattern of chlorine atoms. Even, the surface is bonded ionically to increase the thermal stability, the temperature increase cause vibration of the chlorine atoms and causing damage to data.
Meanwhile, the monolayer is not filly filled with chlorine atom, there are vacancies on the surface, which can be shifted by using electron-phonon interaction, to represent a 0 signal if one unit above chlorine atom or 1 for one unit underneath.
The combination of 0 and 1 signal forms bytes of data in terms of binary numeral system, which is adoptable to traditional computer system. Even the possibilities and evidences show the potential of atomic memory, yet there are constraints for commercialization.
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The constraint for atomic memory
As mentioned, the highly specific condition (Ultrahigh vacuum and ultra-low temperature) to preserve the data storage and data processing is the major constraint for commercializing atomic memory. Yet, the control of individual unit of atoms in large scale has not yet matured to be used as storage devices.
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