{"id":217980,"date":"2025-07-16T01:03:28","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T06:03:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/terabytes-of-data-in-a-tiny-crystal"},"modified":"2025-07-16T01:03:28","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T06:03:28","slug":"terabytes-of-data-in-a-tiny-crystal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/terabytes-of-data-in-a-tiny-crystal","title":{"rendered":"Terabytes of data in a tiny crystal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/terabytes-of-data-in-a-tiny-crystal.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>From punch card-operated looms in the 1800s to modern cellphones, if an object has \u201con\u201d and \u201coff\u201d states, it can be used to store information.<\/p>\n<p>In a laptop computer, the ones and zeroes that make up the binary language are actually transistors either running at low or high voltage. On a compact disc, the one is a spot where a tiny indented \u201cpit\u201d turns to a flat \u201cland\u201d or vice versa, while a zero represents no change.<\/p>\n<p>Historically, the size of the object cycling through those states has put a limit on the size of the storage device. But now, researchers from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have explored a technique to make the metaphorical ones and zeroes out of crystal defects, each the size of an individual atom, for classical computer memory applications.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>UChicago researchers created a \u2018quantum-inspired\u2019 revolution in microelectronics, storing classical computer memory in crystal gaps where atoms should be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From punch card-operated looms in the 1800s to modern cellphones, if an object has \u201con\u201d and \u201coff\u201d states, it can be used to store information. In a laptop computer, the ones and zeroes that make up the binary language are actually transistors either running at low or high voltage. On a compact disc, the one [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,38,1512,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-217980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-engineering","category-mobile-phones","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217980\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}