How to Store a Bit of Data on a Single Molecule

It’s not news that technology is getting smaller, faster, but once things start happening on a molecular level, it starts to get kind of ridiculous. Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology just published breakthrough research in Nature explaining how they were able to read and write a bit of information on a single molecule. The principle behind the process is relatively simple. The researchers embedded a single magnetic iron atom in an organic molecule made up of 51 other atoms that act as a shell to protect the information inside. Applying a stream of electricity to the new molecule changes the state of that iron atom, effectively storing a bit of data.

The relatively simple process could lead to huge leaps in information storage technology. If you consider that your typical magnetic drive needs 3 million atoms for a bit of data, these molecular bits could store 60,000 times as much information in the same space. Now we’re not talking about gigabytes of storage in your typical hard drive but rather hundreds of petabytes. A single petabyte amounts to one billion gigabytes or enough space to store 13.3 years of HD video.

Of course, there are complications. This technology would likely be put to use in solid state hard drives, but the circuitry alone would take up far more space than the molecular storage units. You’d need one wire to deliver the electric jolt and another to read the molecule’s state. But with advances like quantum computing shrinking everything else in the machine, these kinds of breakthroughs just prove that technology is disappearing before our eyes. h3. Connections:
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