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447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

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Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#71

Post by qingcharles »

bastawhiz wrote: post #60

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…

The fact that most of the world's data is still stored on little spinny disks, considering how many times in the last 40 years we've seen this story, is criminal.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#72

Post by iliatoli »

dgfl wrote: post #44

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…

Author here. Some fair points, some misreadings.

The caching comment refers to the Tier 1 controller holding a bitmap of bits it has already scanned — standard practice in any scanning probe system. It's not competing with the storage medium for capacity.

Tier 2 is explicitly labeled speculative. The paper's validation target is Tier 1: one C-AFM scan, one voltage pulse, existing equipment.

The core contribution is not the architecture — it's the physics: a verified transition state for C-F pyramidal inversion at 4.6 eV (B3LYP) and 4.8 eV (CCSD(T)), one imaginary frequency, barrier below bond dissociation. That's standard computational chemistry, not handwaving. The architecture sections are forward-looking by design.

The fluorine passes between two carbon neighbors through a C-C gap of 2.64 Å at the transition state — not through any atom. This is pyramidal inversion, the same mechanism as ammonia, but with a 4.6 eV barrier instead of 0.25 eV.

Magnetic tape comparison is in Table 2.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#73

Post by iliatoli »

YZF wrote: post #48
iliatoli wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stat…

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 impleme…

Patent strategy is under consideration. Happy to discuss offline — ilia.toli@gmail.com.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#74

Post by iliatoli »

MrEldritch wrote: post #51

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 co…

The fluorine doesn't pass through carbon. It passes between two neighboring carbons through a C-C gap of 2.64 Å at the transition state. This is pyramidal inversion — the same mechanism as ammonia (NH₃), but with a 4.6 eV barrier instead of 0.25 eV. The transition state geometry is computed and verified with one imaginary frequency.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#75

Post by golem14 »

XorNot wrote: post #43
golem14 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any pointers on said 50kWh battery? Asking for a friend.

This was the group who did it for me in Australia: https://voltxenergy.com.au/ 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 whole…

Yeah, unfortunately shipping anything with Li-Ion to my friend is pretty tough. Especially anything larger than a power bank. Amazon isn't even shipping those.

I have hopes for Sodium-Ion cells, they should be way more shippable and presumably a better fit for residential power.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#76

Post by iliatoli »

gus_massa wrote: post #62
iliatoli wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stat…

What were the topics and titles of your dissertation in the first two PhD? Were they related to this topic or totally different? Edit: https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=61429 It looks quite unrelated

First PhD: algebraic cryptanalysis (Pisa). Second PhD: exact solutions to the Schrödinger equation for few-body systems (UCF). Both unrelated to fluorographane — the connection emerged later.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#77

Post by tw04 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #60

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…

> You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write.

I don’t think this would bother the average enterprise in the least. We used to have entire rooms dedicated to tape libraries that housed dozens of tape drives and thousands of tapes each.

The read and write speed are absolutely critical but having to utilize multiple devices isn’t anything new at all.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#78

Post by edfletcher_t137 »

gus_massa wrote: post #62
iliatoli wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stat…

What were the topics and titles of your dissertation in the first two PhD? Were they related to this topic or totally different? Edit: https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=61429 It looks quite unrelated

This is their referenced 2013 paper on the subject:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258423577_Data_Stor...

Clearly they have been working on this for over a decade.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#79

Post by smallerize »

ilaksh wrote: post #18
mkprc wrote: post #4

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.

Sniff test as in you turned your nose up without even looking at it on a purely surface level based on affiliation. Smells like laziness to me.

There's no point spending time wading into every crackpot paper. The volume is too high. I'm not saying this specific paper is junk, but I don't blame people for having a quick filter.

Re: 447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane

#80

Post by gus_massa »

iliatoli wrote: post #74
MrEldritch wrote: post #51

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 co…

The fluorine doesn't pass through carbon. It passes between two neighboring carbons through a C-C gap of 2.64 Å at the transition state. This is pyramidal inversion — the same mechanism as ammonia (NH₃), but with a 4.6 eV barrier instead of 0.25 eV. The transition state geometry is computed and verified with one imaginary frequency.

> with one imaginary frequency

Technical note, because it's jargon:

"Real" means position = A * sin(w * t)

"Imaginary" means position = A * expt(w * t)

(because expt(w * i * t) = cos(w * t) + i * sin(w * t))

If you calculate in a computer an ammonia molecule with all the atom is a plane z = 0 (instead of the usual piramidal shape), then the N in the center is in an inestable equilibrium and the N does not make small vibrations like z = expt(w * t).

It makes a big "imaginary" vibration like z = expt(w * t) that is exponential for a short time while z is almost 0, and then the approximations don't apply and it reach the z of the usual shape at equilibrium.

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