Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes.
Demonstrating this stuff is possible isn't the hard part, it seems. Productionizing it is. You have to have exceedingly fast read and write speeds: who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it, or if you produce data faster than you can write it? It has to be durable under adverse conditions. It has to be practical to manufacture the medium and the drives. You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write. By the time most of these problems are worked out, most of these technologies aren't a whole lot better than existing tech.
Stick this on the "Wouldn't it be nice if graphene..." pile.
The concept is interesting, but I'm getting a lot of red flags from this - there's no experimental data or proof-of-concept work at all, which makes this feel more like a blue-sky "Look what we could do if we could arrange atoms however we wanted!" pipe dream in the Drexlerian mode. Something about the writing style's also pinging my LLM radar, which while not disqualifying in-and-of-itself is very discouraging in combination with the other funkiness. The chemistry and manufacturability strike me as questionable in particular, and I'm not convinced the physics of reading and writing are nearly as clean as the author seems to think.
(I'm also unclear how the bit is supposed to actually flip under the applied electric charge without the fluorine and carbon having to pass through each other.)
This is a pipe dream and I’m almost tempted to say a fever dream. The chemistry part seems somewhat sound, even though that’s outside of my field of expertise. But the entire readout process is questionable, and has clear signs of heavy AI writing.
The AFM mechanism described as “tier 1” (very strong LLMism, btw) is somewhat optimistic but realistic. The fields needed are large compared to usual values in solid state devices, but I’d guess achievable with an AFM. But “tier 2” is vague and completely speculative. Some random things I noted:
- handwaving that (not exact quote) “the read controller is cached. No need to read the same bit twice”. Cached with what?? If this miraculous technology can achieve 25 PB/s, what can possibly hope to cache it? More generally, it’s a strange thing to point out.
- some magic and completely handwaved MEMS array that converts an 8um spot size laser beam into atomic-resolution 2D addressing? In my opinion this is the biggest sin of the manuscript. What I understood to be depicted is just fundamentally physically impossible.
- a general misunderstanding of integrated electronics, and dishonest benchmarking, comparing real memory technologies being sold at scale right now, vs theoretical physical bounds on an untested idea. Also no mention of existing magnetic tape as far as I can tell.
- constantly pulling out specific numbers or estimates with no citation and insufficient justification. Too many examples to even count.
I’m sorry for the harsh language, I wouldn’t use it for a usual review. But in my opinion this needs a very heavy toning down and complete rewrite, and is unfit for a proper review. Final remark: electronics is, and will always fundamentally be, intrinsically denser than optics. Some techniques “described” here, if they were possible, would have been applied to existing optical tech (i.e. phase change materials in blue-ray).
Yes, this paper is insane. The actual quote about caching is:
```
Once a region of tape has been read, the controller stores the
result. Subsequent operations reference the cache rather than re-interrogating the physical
medium. Re-reading a known bit is unnecessary; the controller already holds its state
```
However, earlier, the paper claims:
```
The transformer architectures underpin-
ning modern large language models are bandwidth-limited, not compute-limited [1–3]. The
energy consumed moving data between DRAM, NAND flash, and processor cache already
exceeds the energy consumed by arithmetic in datacenter AI accelerators [2]. This is not an
optimization problem. It is a materials problem
```
as part of a longer rant about the AI "memory wall". If memory is expensive in material cost and energy cost and this material is a solution for that then what are we caching the read in? On that note, what kind of computer engineer thinks about cache on the order of individual bits on a medium?
Sniff test: a paper with a single author and 53 revisions, listing a gmail address as contact information despite the author, after a brief internet search, appearing to have affiliations with CSU Global, (maybe) the University of Central Florida, and the San Jose State University Department of Aerospace.
Author here. Three PhDs (Mathematics, Pisa; Quantum Chemistry, UCF; Materials Science, UTD — in progress), plus MS degrees from SJSU and CSU. The gmail is because this is independent work, not affiliated with any institution. v53 reflects thirteen years of development since the original 2013 publication (Graphene 1, 107–109). The barrier is verified at two independent levels of theory with a confirmed transition state. Happy to discuss the physics.
Is there a reason you went for 3 PhDs? Especially since they're all in STEM? To me it's a red flag because the point of a PhD is to learn to do research, you don't need to get another one to move between fields (especially within STEM), just need to do research with people in those fields and gain experience.
Each PhD was in a different country and decade. Mathematics (Pisa, 2000s), Quantum Chemistry (UCF, 2010s), Materials Science (UTD, now). The fluorographane work exists because all three converge — the barrier calculation is quantum chemistry, the proof structure is mathematics, and the material is materials science. I didn't plan it this way.
Fair question. In my case, each PhD opened a door that didn't exist from the previous position. The mathematics PhD in Italy didn't give me access to computational chemistry labs in the US. The quantum chemistry PhD didn't give me access to materials science groups. Immigration, funding structures, and departmental boundaries created the path — not a desire for credentials. The fluorographane paper is the proof that the path was worth it.
What's so special about specifically the PhD student experience that isn't accessible once you have the PhD?
My experience has been that research became much more fulfilling after finishing my PhD. I got more research independence, the level of work I was expected to do increased, and as a bonus, my salary almost tripled. It was like having the world open up, and starting to really experience being a scientist without my PI protecting me.
I was curious about their decisions because if you're taking on the opportunity cost of a PhD, it's probably because you enjoy research, but if you enjoy research, you wouldn't keep going back to the starting point. So, without additional context, it seemed like they just wanted the credentials.
I think it was also worth asking because universities often want to know why you want another PhD, since from their perspective, spending that funding on someone with no PhD potentially creates a new researcher (vs spending it on an existing researcher). So, if they managed to get into a PhD program again, they probably had a good reason.
Their response about different countries is an explanation (especially from an immigration angle), it's not like I'm asking them to lay out all their personal circumstances behind the decision in detail.
Some people do not need to worry about material possessions as much as some others because of the random birth wealth lottery. Then they can pursue interests in less goal driven ways than it would otherwise seem wise
In many European counties it's easily feasible to just study all your life while working ~20 hours / week. I won no lottery but had no issue spending a decade of my life pursuing interests at universities while working 20-30 / hours a week in a comfortable software dev job.
If I'm paying for "free" education with my tax euros, I might as well use it.
That works as long as you don’t expect to graduate: in many EU nations, higher education students are required to complete at least 60 ECTS credits per year, or lose their study right / enrollment.
There are lots of stipends etc. If you don't plan to have kids, and you don't care about luxuries, you will have healthy food and a roof and not be thinking about money. Probably the decision is to forgo luxuries and child raising, and hope you don't need to help a sick relative etc. if you want do to this forever. But it is not impossible in STEM.
Curious if you've patented this? Very cool. The physics is way beyond me but I understand that each atom in the crystal can be in two states? And those are stable? There is no cross talk or decay at all?
You're comparing to current memory technologies but there are also some optical technologies like AIE-DDPR which presumably is (a lot?) less dense but has layers (I noticed you're also discussing a volumetric implementation), would devices based on your technology be simpler/faster? (I guess optical disks don't intend to replace high speed memory). What about access times?
Hey -- I have 0 PHDs so take this with a grain of salt :)
I had thought for a while about a way to store data that makes use of an idea that I had for sub-diffraction limited imaging inspired by STED microscopy.
First an overview of STED. You have a "donut" shaped laser (or toroidal laser) that is fired on a sample. This laser has an inner hole that is below the diffraction limit. This laser is used to deplete the ability of the sample to fluoresce, and then immediately after a second laser is shone on the same spot. The parts of the sample depleted by the donut laser don't fluoresce and so you only see the donut hole fluoresce. This allows you to image below the diffraction limit.
My idea was to apply this along with a layer in the material that exhibits sum frequency generation (SFG). The idea is that you can shine the donut laser with frequency A and a gaussian laser with frequency B at the same spot. When they interact in the SFG material you get some third frequency C as a result of SFG. Then, below that material would be a material that doesn't transmit frequencies C and A.
Then what you'd be left with after the light shines through those two layers is some amount of light at frequency B. The brightness inside the hole and outside of the hole would depend on how much of the light from frequency B converts into frequency C. Sum frequency generation is a very inefficient process, with only some tiny portion of the light participating, but my thinking is that if laser B is significantly less bright than laser A, then what will happen is that most of the light from laser B will participate in sum frequency generation where it mixes with laser A, and that you'll be left with only a tiny bit of laser A outside of the hole, so that you get a nice contrast ratio for the light at frequency A between the hole and the surroundings that then allow you to image whatever is below these layers below the diffraction limit.
In my idea the final layer is some kind of optical storage medium that can be be read/written by the laser below the diffraction limit. Obviously aiming this would be hard :) My idea was that it would be some kind of spinning disk, but I never really got to that point.
No lab — the work is computational. All calculations run on a Dell Precision workstation with ORCA (quantum chemistry) software. An experimental collaborator is now preparing the C-AFM validation. The solo approach is a consequence of the work spanning multiple fields that don't share a single department.
Have you considered subjecting this to expert scrutiny by submitting to a journal? That's probably better than getting hot takes on HN by random technology enthusiasts, skeptics, anon experts, and trolls.
Realistically I don't see how this could be submitted to a journal as-is.
I'm sure you could take this material and write a couple papers out of it, but right now this is a 60 page word document with commentary on a variety of topics from memory market economics to quantum computing.
It's full of self-congratulatory language like "The transition is not an
incremental improvement within the existing paradigm; it obsoletes the paradigm and the infrastructure built around it". Alright, I'm happy to believe that this work is important. But this is not the neutral tone of a scientific article, it reads like ad copy for a new technology.
I'm sure there's interesting physics in there, but it needs a serious editing effort before it could be taken seriously by a journal.
The paper has been under peer review at Physica Scripta (IOP) since March 25. The reviewers will decide what stays and what's trimmed. You're reading a preprint, not the final version. The tone in the architecture sections reflects the scope of the claim — reviewers may ask me to moderate it, and I will. The core physics (Sections 2–3) is standard computational chemistry: DFT, transition state optimization, CCSD(T) validation. Those sections read like any other ab initio paper.
Just remember Watson and Crick's famously humble line in their 1953 Nature paper: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
Yes — the input files, level of theory, and software (ORCA 6.1.1, free for academics) are all specified in the paper. The calculations are fully reproducible.
"A scanning-probe prototype already constitutes a functional non-volatile memory device with areal density exceeding all existing technologies by more than five orders of magnitude."
Does that mean a scanning tunneling microscope is the I/O mechanism?
That's been demoed for atom-level storage in the past. But it's too slow for use.
Yes, Tier 1 is scanning probe — C-AFM specifically. Slow but sufficient for proof of concept. The paper describes a Tier 2 architecture using near-field mid-IR arrays for parallel read/write, projecting 25 PB/s aggregate throughput. Tier 1 proves the physics. Tier 2 is the engineering path to speed.
Tier 2 requires near-field infrared optics at sub-10 nm resolution — that's active research in several groups but not commercially available yet. The immediate next step is Tier 1: one C-AFM image proving the read, one voltage pulse proving the write. That's $300 in materials and access to an AFM. Already in progress with a collaborator.
at that level (Tier 2) we're basically talking plasmonics, right? optics + antenna theory for the uninitiated. SPR, quantum plasmonics, active nanophotonics.. that's some advance shit from the (hopefully near) future, man. This is mostly in semiconductor research now, right? maybe biology?
Fair point. That's why the paper labels it Tier 2 (near-term research) rather than Tier 1 (existing instrumentation). Tier 1 — scanning probe read/write on a single sample — is the immediate validation target and requires no new technology.
Not a typo. Fluorographene is the sp² form (Nair et al. 2010). Fluorographane uses the -ane suffix to denote full sp³ saturation — same convention as graphene → graphane. The sp³ hybridization is what creates the bistable C-F orientation that stores the bit.
Yeah, I've been baited by "breakthroughs" in storage technology for almost 40 years at this point [1]. I'll believe it when it's in Best Buy. Battery "breakthroughs" have really taken up the mantle of headline-grabbing research fund-raising articles so it's nice to see a throwback to the OG: storage.
I am about the same age and tarted loading programs off cassette tapes. The fact that I can get a terabyte of storage in a micro SD card the size of my pinkie nail for under $200 still impresses me.
It's always "research". I put that in quotes because any press like this isn't really "research", it's "fund-raising". It's the academic game of getting papers into the right publications, getting "street cred" by getting the right heavyweights as co-authors and to cite you, to become a "heavyweight" by doing the same thing and ultimately getting more grants to perpetuate the cycle.
Research can be interesting but so often none of it goes anywhere, it's just hype and there's a reproducibility crisis in academia. Look at the decades wasted on academic fraud and appeals to authority with Alzheimer's research [1].
Most of this media is the academic equivalent of "dcotors HATE This guy".
It was under subsidy, but I got about double what I was going to get about 6 months prior. There are 50kwh units going on AliExpress for about $12k AUD outright so I think there's been another step down in per-cell costs which is tickling through.
I'm waiting for a price cut to make outright purchases a bit more affordable but with a wholesale electricity service plan adding another say 100kWh probably works out.
Demonstrating this stuff is possible isn't the hard part, it seems. Productionizing it is. You have to have exceedingly fast read and write speeds: who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it, or if you produce data faster than you can write it? It has to be durable under adverse conditions. It has to be practical to manufacture the medium and the drives. You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write. By the time most of these problems are worked out, most of these technologies aren't a whole lot better than existing tech.
Stick this on the "Wouldn't it be nice if graphene..." pile.
(I'm also unclear how the bit is supposed to actually flip under the applied electric charge without the fluorine and carbon having to pass through each other.)
The AFM mechanism described as “tier 1” (very strong LLMism, btw) is somewhat optimistic but realistic. The fields needed are large compared to usual values in solid state devices, but I’d guess achievable with an AFM. But “tier 2” is vague and completely speculative. Some random things I noted: - handwaving that (not exact quote) “the read controller is cached. No need to read the same bit twice”. Cached with what?? If this miraculous technology can achieve 25 PB/s, what can possibly hope to cache it? More generally, it’s a strange thing to point out. - some magic and completely handwaved MEMS array that converts an 8um spot size laser beam into atomic-resolution 2D addressing? In my opinion this is the biggest sin of the manuscript. What I understood to be depicted is just fundamentally physically impossible. - a general misunderstanding of integrated electronics, and dishonest benchmarking, comparing real memory technologies being sold at scale right now, vs theoretical physical bounds on an untested idea. Also no mention of existing magnetic tape as far as I can tell. - constantly pulling out specific numbers or estimates with no citation and insufficient justification. Too many examples to even count.
I’m sorry for the harsh language, I wouldn’t use it for a usual review. But in my opinion this needs a very heavy toning down and complete rewrite, and is unfit for a proper review. Final remark: electronics is, and will always fundamentally be, intrinsically denser than optics. Some techniques “described” here, if they were possible, would have been applied to existing optical tech (i.e. phase change materials in blue-ray).
``` Once a region of tape has been read, the controller stores the result. Subsequent operations reference the cache rather than re-interrogating the physical medium. Re-reading a known bit is unnecessary; the controller already holds its state ```
However, earlier, the paper claims: ``` The transformer architectures underpin- ning modern large language models are bandwidth-limited, not compute-limited [1–3]. The energy consumed moving data between DRAM, NAND flash, and processor cache already exceeds the energy consumed by arithmetic in datacenter AI accelerators [2]. This is not an optimization problem. It is a materials problem ``` as part of a longer rant about the AI "memory wall". If memory is expensive in material cost and energy cost and this material is a solution for that then what are we caching the read in? On that note, what kind of computer engineer thinks about cache on the order of individual bits on a medium?
My experience has been that research became much more fulfilling after finishing my PhD. I got more research independence, the level of work I was expected to do increased, and as a bonus, my salary almost tripled. It was like having the world open up, and starting to really experience being a scientist without my PI protecting me.
I was curious about their decisions because if you're taking on the opportunity cost of a PhD, it's probably because you enjoy research, but if you enjoy research, you wouldn't keep going back to the starting point. So, without additional context, it seemed like they just wanted the credentials.
I think it was also worth asking because universities often want to know why you want another PhD, since from their perspective, spending that funding on someone with no PhD potentially creates a new researcher (vs spending it on an existing researcher). So, if they managed to get into a PhD program again, they probably had a good reason.
Their response about different countries is an explanation (especially from an immigration angle), it's not like I'm asking them to lay out all their personal circumstances behind the decision in detail.
If I'm paying for "free" education with my tax euros, I might as well use it.
You're comparing to current memory technologies but there are also some optical technologies like AIE-DDPR which presumably is (a lot?) less dense but has layers (I noticed you're also discussing a volumetric implementation), would devices based on your technology be simpler/faster? (I guess optical disks don't intend to replace high speed memory). What about access times?
I had thought for a while about a way to store data that makes use of an idea that I had for sub-diffraction limited imaging inspired by STED microscopy.
First an overview of STED. You have a "donut" shaped laser (or toroidal laser) that is fired on a sample. This laser has an inner hole that is below the diffraction limit. This laser is used to deplete the ability of the sample to fluoresce, and then immediately after a second laser is shone on the same spot. The parts of the sample depleted by the donut laser don't fluoresce and so you only see the donut hole fluoresce. This allows you to image below the diffraction limit.
My idea was to apply this along with a layer in the material that exhibits sum frequency generation (SFG). The idea is that you can shine the donut laser with frequency A and a gaussian laser with frequency B at the same spot. When they interact in the SFG material you get some third frequency C as a result of SFG. Then, below that material would be a material that doesn't transmit frequencies C and A.
Then what you'd be left with after the light shines through those two layers is some amount of light at frequency B. The brightness inside the hole and outside of the hole would depend on how much of the light from frequency B converts into frequency C. Sum frequency generation is a very inefficient process, with only some tiny portion of the light participating, but my thinking is that if laser B is significantly less bright than laser A, then what will happen is that most of the light from laser B will participate in sum frequency generation where it mixes with laser A, and that you'll be left with only a tiny bit of laser A outside of the hole, so that you get a nice contrast ratio for the light at frequency A between the hole and the surroundings that then allow you to image whatever is below these layers below the diffraction limit.
In my idea the final layer is some kind of optical storage medium that can be be read/written by the laser below the diffraction limit. Obviously aiming this would be hard :) My idea was that it would be some kind of spinning disk, but I never really got to that point.
And what’s the reason for going solo vs a research university, where I assume this type of research could be significantly sped up?
I'm sure you could take this material and write a couple papers out of it, but right now this is a 60 page word document with commentary on a variety of topics from memory market economics to quantum computing.
It's full of self-congratulatory language like "The transition is not an incremental improvement within the existing paradigm; it obsoletes the paradigm and the infrastructure built around it". Alright, I'm happy to believe that this work is important. But this is not the neutral tone of a scientific article, it reads like ad copy for a new technology.
I'm sure there's interesting physics in there, but it needs a serious editing effort before it could be taken seriously by a journal.
Big discoveries will speak for themselves.
Smells like laziness to me.
Does that mean a scanning tunneling microscope is the I/O mechanism? That's been demoed for atom-level storage in the past. But it's too slow for use.
fluorographane -> Fluorographene
Can't find a single page about fluorographane
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=fluorographane&t...
But this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorographene
https://nowigetit.us/pages/d7f94fd0-e608-47f9-8805-429898105...
[1]: https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1991/06/23/holograms-the-ne...
Research can be interesting but so often none of it goes anywhere, it's just hype and there's a reproducibility crisis in academia. Look at the decades wasted on academic fraud and appeals to authority with Alzheimer's research [1].
Most of this media is the academic equivalent of "dcotors HATE This guy".
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12397490/
The price of the 50kwh unit I had put into my house was very low.
Sodium ion is ramping up too but is commercially available. That straight wasn't possible a few years ago till the electrode breakthroughs.
It was under subsidy, but I got about double what I was going to get about 6 months prior. There are 50kwh units going on AliExpress for about $12k AUD outright so I think there's been another step down in per-cell costs which is tickling through.
I'm waiting for a price cut to make outright purchases a bit more affordable but with a wholesale electricity service plan adding another say 100kWh probably works out.