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.
It took 15 if not 20 years to commercialize even such obvious, low-tech thing as radio telegraph, which can literally be built form common house supplies. It happened about 60 years after Maxwell predicted the electromagnetic waves theoretically.
Red LEDs were invented / discovered in 1920s, became commercially successful as indicators in 1960s. Optical fibers were invented in 1920s or so, became a commercial success in 1980s.
Certain things just take time. Do not dismiss a good physical effect, they are much more rare than so-called good ideas.
It doesn't take long to commercialize feasible new tech in this day and age. If someone invented an electromagnetic hovercar tomorrow, it will be available for sale next week and regulations will follow after.
Waymo has cars that drive themselves and are dramatically safer than people in most conditions and yet they're only in select cities.
Do you just think Google hates money, or does this only work for hover cars
> Waymo has cars that drive themselves
With the help of “remote assistance”, that is. Which is probably one of the reasons for the limited rollout.
Perhaps you could clarify your definition of "remote assistance", or describe scenarios.
I don't know the costs and logistics of such an operation. Maybe you do?
> It doesn't take long to commercialize feasible new tech
“Feasible” is doing some heavy lifting there. The whole point of the comment you replied to is that it can take a long time for some new physical technique to become commercially feasible.
What advantage would hovering have?
No Street Infrastructure needeed to drive anywhere (kinda).
Ok, and where does the energy to consistently keep a weight in the air come from and is it really worth spending?
I know flying cars are some sort of futuristic trope, yet I cringe at it every time I see it. They always assume magical infinite power. In the real the reason we do not have flying cars is the same why you don't use a drone as a coat hanger at home: It is just more practical to use a mechanical solution that holds your coat for infinite time without any energy use or noise/heat emissions and it is much cheaper.
Lifting stuff against gravity is not free, but a piece of wood, a brick or a rubber wheel does a pretty good job at it. One way to do it is magnets, but that means you need even more complicated roads.
We are living on a warming planet where only the naive and the evil pretend that energy use is something only the poor have to think about. We all have to think about it.
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What do you mean “we don’t have flying cars”? What are helicopters then?
Deathmachines that in their mechanical hubris angered the gods?
smoother ride, no need for wheels so no road friction and fewer parts that wear, no need for shock absorbers as well, no need for roads clean of snow and ice which would make them both more practical and safer.. if we're talking star trek hovering, not rotor blade / hovercraft noisy shit with rotating parts that waste a ton of energy.
Aha, and which of the fundamental forces in our universe would it work with?
The only technologies that are commercialised quickly today are the ones that can be commercialised quickly. The ones that can't won't be for decades yet.
In short, if a tech takes 40 years to be commercialised it would have been invented some time in the 80s.
It feels a little disjointed to compare old tech. Computing tech iteration cycles and adoption rates seem more interesting than things at the dawn of communications technology.
Communication technologies have been evolving for billions of years
> who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it
To be fair, if I'm reading an exabyte in a month, my hardware's pushing >3 Tbps, which I'd be very happy with.
Plus just put 32 in stripping RAID if you really need to read an exabyte a day
*RAED
Or maybe RAEND
RAVED is more likely. These things aren't cheap.
What is RAVED?
I read it as "Redundant Array of Very Expensive Disks".
But if you need 1eb, waiting a whole month for it isn't great. You'd be better off with 720 1pb devices taking an hour in parallel.
Yes it causes problems in this increasingly narrow situation.
Massive storage that takes a month to fully read is acceptable in a wide variety of use cases. If it's cheaper than hard drives it'll get a huge amount of users.
It's notable that 'time to read/write entire device' has been creeping up for any storage device you can buy off the shelf for the past ~40 years.
Reading a floppy disk took around 30 secs for example. A whole CD took 5 mins. My whole 1TB SSD takes 10 mins.
A modern hard drive (36TB @ 280MB/s) can take more than a day. If you treat a bank of tapes as one device this can get even more extreme.
Interesting, this is my first time consciously thinking about this trend.
Perhaps the needs for read/write speed are bounded (before processor, etc. becomes the limiting factor), while more capacity is only limited by price. Or maybe increasing density of storage inherently means a tradeoff with I/O speed (AFAIK, NAND flash needs to rewrite lots of data just to make a single write? Atom-scale interactions have side effects)
In long term archival use cases this is less of an issue. Especially if it’s many exabytes we’re talking about, needing to be stored for decades.
But I 100% agree with your main point about possibility vs productionisation.
Well, yeah. It takes a heck of a long time to pull something out of the lab, let alone theory, into the real world, and there's a ton of ways that it can die along the way. But you do need people to be pursuing these things to actually get something into production, else there really would never be any progress. To me this reaction feels a bit of a misunderstanding about why it's worth discussing these ideas at all: it's not meant to be a forecast of where technology is definitely going in the future, it's a potential direction that some people think is worth pursuing, and even if the odds are low for any given idea it doesn't make them worthless. (I've worked for near 10 years to turn something that 'worked in the lab' when I joined into an actual product, for example, and it's still not quite standing on its own feet in production yet).
I'm not familiar enough with the space to know how this idea rates compared to alternative options at similar levels of development: the density is obviously extreme (but probably not the biggest advantage), and it makes sense to me that the underlying physics could work robustly, but the practicalities of how you read and write seem pretty difficult (and I think the paper kind of glosses over this: read caching and defect mapping could be trickier than it implied. Accessing the tape from both sides also seems like it will make the engineering more difficult).
I have no idea if this is practical but I remember when flash memory was this suspicious semi-science fiction thing too. There are probably some people on this site that remember the same for DRAM. There have been loads of things in between that didn't make it. Some of them were semi-crackpot, some actually went into production like bubble memory and Optane. Few of them have met the sweet spot of the market in a way that let them move from a niche to a dominant form of memory, but still I wouldn't discount that it's possible to invent a new form of memory that will take over the world!
Most kinds of memory devices are based on old principles of making a memory device, which are applied to new materials.
I do not think that any new memory device principles have been invented after WWII. Already by 1940, the inventor of DRAM, John Vincent Atanasoff, had enumerated almost all principles that can be used to make a memory device.
The first DRAM of Atanasoff was made with discrete capacitors, then 5-years later von Neumann proposed to use iconoscope cathode-ray tubes instead, which were used for a few years, before being replaced by magnetic core memories. The Intel company was formed for the commercialization of the first (1-kbit) DRAM integrated circuit made with MOS transistors.
The memory described in TFA is in principle equivalent with a memory made with mechanical toggle switches or latching relays with mechanical latching, where the 2 stable states are maintained by elastic forces and you can toggle the state if you apply a force great enough on the switch.
Reducing a mechanical bistable device to the size of a few atoms reaches the possible limit of memory density. As described in the parent article, this device should be able to store information safely and it should be able to switch is state quickly.
The difficulties are not in the memory cell itself, but in how to enable fast and accurate reading and writing. While the memory cell itself may have the minimum size permitted by the atomic structure, there is no way to miniaturize to the same extent any kind of reading and writing interfaces, so that they could be incorporated in the memory cell, like in an SRAM cell.
Therefore the only solution that can preserve the high cell density is to have a read/write head that is shared by a great number of cells, i.e. which must be moved in order to access different cells.
So the memory, at least within some block, must have mechanical access, so it must be implemented as a tape or a disc. Multiple heads could be used to increase the read/write speed, like also for magnetic memories.
So I do not think that there is much to criticize in this paper, it makes sense and it identifies a new material that is suitable for implementing a known kind of memory cell at an atomic scale, even if it is unlikely that a practical memory based on this concept will become possible any time soon.
Microsoft has worked for many years on their glass memory devices, which have much more important advantages, and they are still far from being able to sell such devices, mainly due to the cost of the required lasers, for which there is a chicken-and-egg problem, they are very expensive because they are produced in very small quantities and they cannot be incorporated in a device intended for mass production, because they are too expensive.
> who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it
> You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write
Are you only thinking about home consumer applications?
I’m not sure what the GP is thinking, but I would love a cheap-ish exabyte storage even if it takes a month to read fully. Damn, I’d gladly take it even if the speed is comparable to an SSD! (Though the price would be a question of course.)
> 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.
Used to? We absolutely still do. LTO is a widely used format, and as far as I'm aware, it is "picking up more steam" each year.
In terms of capacity, LTO sales are increasing. In terms of tape count and drive count, there's been a steady decline.
I don't think there are public numbers. No doubt IBM knows. I do expect that trend to reverse this year if true.
Unless something is wrong with these numbers, it's simple enough to do rough math to get tape count and compare with historical numbers.
Claims of 5.7 or 5.8 million drives over the lifetime of the format can also be compared to older data to see a slowdown.
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It doubles design, development, and manufacturing cost, potentially doubling your supply chain. It's not a problem for the consumer.
Basically you just ignore the hyped up press releases, this just accompanies most semi-cool/exciting papers. The scientists probably know this isn't going to be some new storage that will become widespread but its just part of the game to sell the story like this and the administration wants this.
1 exabyte/month is 380GB/s, which would be pretty epic in my opinion!
I remember my father showing me one of those articles when I was a kid about a postal stamp size, thin and lightweight new memory system. I remember we were as doubtful then as you are now. A few years later I remember that moment while switching the micro SD card of a camera… Sometimes this breakthroughs turns out to be exactly as they are told
> Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes.
Of course, wouldn't you expect that for a fairly mature technology that you'd get tons of false starts from competing tech before eventually getting one breakthrough that completely changed everything? I mean, you could have written a comment that was perfectly analogous to your paragraph above about how AI and neural networks never really amounted to much for about 50-60 years until, all of the sudden, they did (and even if you think AI may currently be overhyped, it's undeniable that in the past 5 years that AI has had an effect on society probably much greater than all the previous history of AI put together).
I prefer to read this academic paper as "Oh, this is a really interesting approach, I wonder what its limitations are" vs. interpreting at as a "this new storage tech will change the world!!!" announcement. I feel like the first approach leads to generally more curiosity, while the second just leads to cynicism and jadedness.
Very large, fast, read-only memory now has an incredible use-case: NN weights.
In fairness, i assume any headline that emphasizes some excessively large storage density is probably at best something useful for archiving and not a replacement for an SSD. If they were targeting latency they would lead with those numbers not the density.
Aren't lasers driving the current 32TB+ HDD tech?
yeah but that wasn't a straight upgrade, either. HAMR has all sorts of tradeoffs.
Every article like this there is someone that points this out. Not hard to do but sure is reliable.
The hard work would be maintaining a database of ideas which were similarly hyped over the past (say) couple centuries - including details on if/when each idea worked out, or fell out of hype-space, or was proven useless.
From that, you might be able to draw useful conclusions. Well...you'd also need correction factors for how profitable the hype itself was, over time, in the various scientific & technical fields.
The business model would be selling db access to VC's, R&D managers, and other folks making decisions about real money.
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.
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.)
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.
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 [emphasis mine].
as part of a longer rant about the AI "memory wall" in the very first section. If we open with a long spiel about how 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?
And, as you point out, 25 PB/s is a lot. Around 1000x that of a typical on-die SRAM cache, I think.
A while later, the author speaks of using atomic force microscopy to read the data back. The size of AFM scans are, in practice, as I understand, along the order of square micrometers. I think this whole paper is an AI-driven, as you put it, 'fever dream', enabling an author to put forth 60 pages of sciencey claims and sciencey math without -- as far as I can tell -- any concrete and novel scientific result of any kind. AI-driven reality warps are not new; the difference is nowdays AIs are good enough at sounding smart to get past the barriers of a typical smart person who might want to be fooled or make a show of being open-minded. Later on, the author proposes using "shaped femtosecond IR pulses" -- without further elaboration -- to address single atoms! IR wavelengths are on the order of a micrometer at minimum!
> Yes, this paper is insane.
Given the amount of AI writing involved, I'm pretty sure that you actually meant "this paper is inane". Or maybe both!
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.
Dude, you _have_ to write things in your own words if you want to be taken seriously. "The <x> is not <y> — it's <z>" will cause a bunch of people to disengage, and those people have high overlap with the people who may fund you.
"Dude, you _have_ to write things in your own words if you want to be taken seriously."
How is this lost on people? Everything that contains the slightest hint of "AI slop" is instantly panned anywhere it appears, and yet people such as Ilia Toli appear to be entirely oblivious to this.
It's tragic. There is at least a non-zero chance that this work is a world changing breakthrough. It's clear, based on his engagement with comments here, that he at least believes this. And yet the first thing the guy does with it is debase it all using a clanker.
It boggles the mind.
We're seeing this throughout academe, in courts with both lawyers and judges, and among lawmakers and journalists. Several times a week one or another of these makes another headline for misapplying "AI". It seems that the work for which we are all expected to have the highest regard is coming from people that are completely witless; both unaware of how transparent this is and unaware of the consequences.
You have to be deeply ensconced inside an impenetrable bubble to do that to yourself.
> You have to be deeply ensconced inside an impenetrable bubble to do that to yourself.
I largely agree with your point, but I’m afraid you are the one in the bubble. Detecting AI writing is a rare skill, not the norm. It’s glaringly obvious to those of us who use AI a lot, but it’s not that obvious to the average person.
To the point of absurdity in cases – I’ve seen loads of people who hate AI complain about AI online, not realising that the account they are talking to is nothing but a simple spam bot.
Yeah, I get that it can be amazing and be of superhuman intelligence and all that, but also it reads exactly like the slop article I saw yesterday that was giving baking instructions for “wood biscuits” (which are a method of joining in cabinetry and are not tasty at all): https://thehoneypotbakery.com/wood-biscuit-size-chart/
Do not match your communication style to nonsense articles.
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Replying to myself, because iliatoli's reply to me was [dead] so fast I couldn't reply to it directly...
"The physics is mine — thirteen years of it, starting from the 2013 paper. I use AI for editing, as I use a calculator for arithmetic. The transition state, the barrier, the molecular model, the fluorine uniqueness argument — all computed on my workstation. The tone criticism is heard and will be addressed in revision. The calculations don't change with the prose."
This is NOT about "prose." You're missing the point. Badly. And damn that's frustrating.
Read carefully and inculcate: Do not use LLM to write anything you expect to be taken seriously. This is not negotiable. It doesn't matter if all your peers and colleagues are doing exactly that. It doesn't matter that this is your first experience with such a reaction: it's not a fluke. DO. NOT. DO. IT.
Am I getting through?
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"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.
What do you need to build a demo of Tier 2? I am guessing if you can do that then you can get an investor.
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?
If you could do that at a high writing rate, could it be used for making ICs?
If you could do that at all, let alone high throughput, you could write the future itself.
Using a mid-IR array with sub 10nm resolution is anything but an engineering path. Tech like that has never left the lab afaik.
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.
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.
That’s amazing. Do you have a home lab with an atomic microscope where you do your research?
And what’s the reason for going solo vs a research university, where I assume this type of research could be significantly sped up?
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.
Couldn't you potentially get some smaller grants from each of the fields? Or is that too much paperwork. It always seems so much work to get those grants.
Getting a grant from a single field is already a full-time job; the research typically gets done as overtime.
It's a near full-time job in and of itself, and the nature of them means that you really want to get a grant for something you've already done and use the scraps from it to fund the new stuff.
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What were the topics and titles of your dissertation in the first two PhD? Were they related to this topic or totally different?
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.
This is their referenced 2013 paper on the subject:
Clearly they have been working on this for over a decade.
The journal (Graphene, ASP) ceased operations and the DOI infrastructure went dark. The paper itself is archived at ResearchGate: researchgate.net/publication/258423577. The content is independently verifiable.
I wanted to check the journal where it was published, there are good journals and bad journals.It's very strange that the doi is dead. I found this http://www.aspbs.com/graphene/contents_graphene2013.htm but it's also full of dead links.
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.
Ah, that's interesting. Different countries can be a fair reason I suppose.
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.
Some people actually enjoy studying and learning in these spaces. Does everything have to be optimized for?
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.
3 PhDs is quite some dedication to science, given that a PhD student life is neither that of plenty nor leisure.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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?
Patent strategy is under consideration. Happy to discuss offline — ilia.toli@gmail.com.
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."
Big discoveries will speak for themselves.
It's under peer review at Physica Scripta (IOP) since March 25. HN is for visibility, not validation.
It would be interesting to hear back after this passes peer review.
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.
I suppose anyone can run the same computer simulations.
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.
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Pardon my ignorance, but why does the "447 TB/cm^2" density value use square centimeters instead of a volume unit? Does the information capacity of this material really scale in proportion to area? How? Or is it just a typo?
fluorographane is a single atomic layer — one carbon thick — so storage density is naturally per unit area. The paper also gives volumetric density for the nanotape spool architecture (0.4–9 ZB/cm³, Section 4.4).
Remarkable. If this material works and is flexible enough, we could someday see tape drives with hundreds of exabytes of capacity.
Author here. The paper describes exactly this — a nanotape spool architecture with volumetric density of 0.4–9 ZB/cm³. Section 4.4 in the preprint.
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.
Looks interesting but cant take it seriously when there are so many red flags of LLM style writing. The author continues to use AI to even reply to comments in this thread. (its not X its Y, Em Dashes, etc.)
Fluorographane is that stuff in factorio space age, no?
The Now I Get non-technical version, because I need someone to explain this to me x)
This is like making the big companies lose their profit money since they still have their old products in their warehouses why would they want this tech to come that's why it never materializes
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as proven by the number of comments treating the paper as an AI slop pipe dream.
I don’t understand the comments here. They say in the last paragraph:
> 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.
Are we supposed to read all these stories as lies?
Now it doesn’t say that this is easy to produce, but if those claims are true, it doesn’t really matter if it is very expensive.
It doesn’t say either if the stuff can withstand live conditions.
It’s annoying not to be able to trust whether solutions like these are viable or not.
The scanning-probe claim is real — C-AFM on fluorographane is achievable with existing commercial instruments. The paper is a computational prediction with a detailed experimental protocol. An experimental collaborator is preparing the validation now. The 'live conditions' question is addressed in Section 5 (radiation hardness, mechanical damage, defect physics).
By itself the density of such a system would just be an interesting superlative: the paper itself references people who have achieved similar densities in the lab, but it's not necessarily useful if the read and write are slow and the total addressable area is miniscule: both things I would expect from the described proof-of-concept (the main point of which would be to demonstrate that the storage works at all, and maybe to evaluate its robustness to some degree).
You should not expect that even the best of ideas at this stage are going to turn into products on any reasonable timescale, this is at a super early level of development and there are probable more things that can go wrong than you are imagining. But the paper shows there has been a good amount of effort at this stage to evaluate the robustness of the storage: the whole reason for this particular arrangement seems to be that it's pretty robust while still being writable. (though anything nanoscale is not something you're going to be able to handle directly)
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Too long, not gonna read. When do I get my 447TB iPhone?
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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.
This is research...
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".
Do you think it’s logically sound to marry the ”no true Scotsman” to a strawman argument?
Or, to imply guilt by association by first constructing a false stereotype of research in one field, and then applying it onto an instance of research in another field?
I mean battery breakthroughs are real though? BYD is now demoing 0-80% in 5 mins on production vehicles in China.
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.
Do you have any pointers on said 50kWh battery? Asking for a friend.
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.
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.
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.
It took 15 if not 20 years to commercialize even such obvious, low-tech thing as radio telegraph, which can literally be built form common house supplies. It happened about 60 years after Maxwell predicted the electromagnetic waves theoretically.
Red LEDs were invented / discovered in 1920s, became commercially successful as indicators in 1960s. Optical fibers were invented in 1920s or so, became a commercial success in 1980s.
Certain things just take time. Do not dismiss a good physical effect, they are much more rare than so-called good ideas.
It doesn't take long to commercialize feasible new tech in this day and age. If someone invented an electromagnetic hovercar tomorrow, it will be available for sale next week and regulations will follow after.
Waymo has cars that drive themselves and are dramatically safer than people in most conditions and yet they're only in select cities.
Do you just think Google hates money, or does this only work for hover cars
> Waymo has cars that drive themselves
With the help of “remote assistance”, that is. Which is probably one of the reasons for the limited rollout.
Perhaps you could clarify your definition of "remote assistance", or describe scenarios.
It’s been widely reported, and there were US Senate hearings about it. See e.g.: https://philkoopman.substack.com/p/waymo-tap-dances-about-re...
I don't know the costs and logistics of such an operation. Maybe you do?
> It doesn't take long to commercialize feasible new tech
“Feasible” is doing some heavy lifting there. The whole point of the comment you replied to is that it can take a long time for some new physical technique to become commercially feasible.
What advantage would hovering have?
No Street Infrastructure needeed to drive anywhere (kinda).
Ok, and where does the energy to consistently keep a weight in the air come from and is it really worth spending?
I know flying cars are some sort of futuristic trope, yet I cringe at it every time I see it. They always assume magical infinite power. In the real the reason we do not have flying cars is the same why you don't use a drone as a coat hanger at home: It is just more practical to use a mechanical solution that holds your coat for infinite time without any energy use or noise/heat emissions and it is much cheaper.
Lifting stuff against gravity is not free, but a piece of wood, a brick or a rubber wheel does a pretty good job at it. One way to do it is magnets, but that means you need even more complicated roads.
We are living on a warming planet where only the naive and the evil pretend that energy use is something only the poor have to think about. We all have to think about it.
What do you mean “we don’t have flying cars”? What are helicopters then?
Deathmachines that in their mechanical hubris angered the gods?
smoother ride, no need for wheels so no road friction and fewer parts that wear, no need for shock absorbers as well, no need for roads clean of snow and ice which would make them both more practical and safer.. if we're talking star trek hovering, not rotor blade / hovercraft noisy shit with rotating parts that waste a ton of energy.
Aha, and which of the fundamental forces in our universe would it work with?
The only technologies that are commercialised quickly today are the ones that can be commercialised quickly. The ones that can't won't be for decades yet.
In short, if a tech takes 40 years to be commercialised it would have been invented some time in the 80s.
It feels a little disjointed to compare old tech. Computing tech iteration cycles and adoption rates seem more interesting than things at the dawn of communications technology.
Communication technologies have been evolving for billions of years
> who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it
To be fair, if I'm reading an exabyte in a month, my hardware's pushing >3 Tbps, which I'd be very happy with.
Plus just put 32 in stripping RAID if you really need to read an exabyte a day
*RAED
Or maybe RAEND
RAVED is more likely. These things aren't cheap.
What is RAVED?
I read it as "Redundant Array of Very Expensive Disks".
But if you need 1eb, waiting a whole month for it isn't great. You'd be better off with 720 1pb devices taking an hour in parallel.
Yes it causes problems in this increasingly narrow situation.
Massive storage that takes a month to fully read is acceptable in a wide variety of use cases. If it's cheaper than hard drives it'll get a huge amount of users.
It's notable that 'time to read/write entire device' has been creeping up for any storage device you can buy off the shelf for the past ~40 years.
Reading a floppy disk took around 30 secs for example. A whole CD took 5 mins. My whole 1TB SSD takes 10 mins.
A modern hard drive (36TB @ 280MB/s) can take more than a day. If you treat a bank of tapes as one device this can get even more extreme.
Interesting, this is my first time consciously thinking about this trend.
Perhaps the needs for read/write speed are bounded (before processor, etc. becomes the limiting factor), while more capacity is only limited by price. Or maybe increasing density of storage inherently means a tradeoff with I/O speed (AFAIK, NAND flash needs to rewrite lots of data just to make a single write? Atom-scale interactions have side effects)
In long term archival use cases this is less of an issue. Especially if it’s many exabytes we’re talking about, needing to be stored for decades.
But I 100% agree with your main point about possibility vs productionisation.
Well, yeah. It takes a heck of a long time to pull something out of the lab, let alone theory, into the real world, and there's a ton of ways that it can die along the way. But you do need people to be pursuing these things to actually get something into production, else there really would never be any progress. To me this reaction feels a bit of a misunderstanding about why it's worth discussing these ideas at all: it's not meant to be a forecast of where technology is definitely going in the future, it's a potential direction that some people think is worth pursuing, and even if the odds are low for any given idea it doesn't make them worthless. (I've worked for near 10 years to turn something that 'worked in the lab' when I joined into an actual product, for example, and it's still not quite standing on its own feet in production yet).
I'm not familiar enough with the space to know how this idea rates compared to alternative options at similar levels of development: the density is obviously extreme (but probably not the biggest advantage), and it makes sense to me that the underlying physics could work robustly, but the practicalities of how you read and write seem pretty difficult (and I think the paper kind of glosses over this: read caching and defect mapping could be trickier than it implied. Accessing the tape from both sides also seems like it will make the engineering more difficult).
I have no idea if this is practical but I remember when flash memory was this suspicious semi-science fiction thing too. There are probably some people on this site that remember the same for DRAM. There have been loads of things in between that didn't make it. Some of them were semi-crackpot, some actually went into production like bubble memory and Optane. Few of them have met the sweet spot of the market in a way that let them move from a niche to a dominant form of memory, but still I wouldn't discount that it's possible to invent a new form of memory that will take over the world!
Most kinds of memory devices are based on old principles of making a memory device, which are applied to new materials.
I do not think that any new memory device principles have been invented after WWII. Already by 1940, the inventor of DRAM, John Vincent Atanasoff, had enumerated almost all principles that can be used to make a memory device.
The first DRAM of Atanasoff was made with discrete capacitors, then 5-years later von Neumann proposed to use iconoscope cathode-ray tubes instead, which were used for a few years, before being replaced by magnetic core memories. The Intel company was formed for the commercialization of the first (1-kbit) DRAM integrated circuit made with MOS transistors.
The memory described in TFA is in principle equivalent with a memory made with mechanical toggle switches or latching relays with mechanical latching, where the 2 stable states are maintained by elastic forces and you can toggle the state if you apply a force great enough on the switch.
Reducing a mechanical bistable device to the size of a few atoms reaches the possible limit of memory density. As described in the parent article, this device should be able to store information safely and it should be able to switch is state quickly.
The difficulties are not in the memory cell itself, but in how to enable fast and accurate reading and writing. While the memory cell itself may have the minimum size permitted by the atomic structure, there is no way to miniaturize to the same extent any kind of reading and writing interfaces, so that they could be incorporated in the memory cell, like in an SRAM cell.
Therefore the only solution that can preserve the high cell density is to have a read/write head that is shared by a great number of cells, i.e. which must be moved in order to access different cells.
So the memory, at least within some block, must have mechanical access, so it must be implemented as a tape or a disc. Multiple heads could be used to increase the read/write speed, like also for magnetic memories.
So I do not think that there is much to criticize in this paper, it makes sense and it identifies a new material that is suitable for implementing a known kind of memory cell at an atomic scale, even if it is unlikely that a practical memory based on this concept will become possible any time soon.
Microsoft has worked for many years on their glass memory devices, which have much more important advantages, and they are still far from being able to sell such devices, mainly due to the cost of the required lasers, for which there is a chicken-and-egg problem, they are very expensive because they are produced in very small quantities and they cannot be incorporated in a device intended for mass production, because they are too expensive.
> who cares if it can store an exabyte if it takes all month to read it > You probably don't want to have to need a separate device to read and a device to write
Are you only thinking about home consumer applications?
I’m not sure what the GP is thinking, but I would love a cheap-ish exabyte storage even if it takes a month to read fully. Damn, I’d gladly take it even if the speed is comparable to an SSD! (Though the price would be a question of course.)
> 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.
Used to? We absolutely still do. LTO is a widely used format, and as far as I'm aware, it is "picking up more steam" each year.
In terms of capacity, LTO sales are increasing. In terms of tape count and drive count, there's been a steady decline.
I don't think there are public numbers. No doubt IBM knows. I do expect that trend to reverse this year if true.
https://www.lto.org/2025/07/lto-tape-technology-shipments-sc...
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/23/lto_2024_tape_shipmen...
Unless something is wrong with these numbers, it's simple enough to do rough math to get tape count and compare with historical numbers.
Claims of 5.7 or 5.8 million drives over the lifetime of the format can also be compared to older data to see a slowdown.
It doubles design, development, and manufacturing cost, potentially doubling your supply chain. It's not a problem for the consumer.
Basically you just ignore the hyped up press releases, this just accompanies most semi-cool/exciting papers. The scientists probably know this isn't going to be some new storage that will become widespread but its just part of the game to sell the story like this and the administration wants this.
1 exabyte/month is 380GB/s, which would be pretty epic in my opinion!
I remember my father showing me one of those articles when I was a kid about a postal stamp size, thin and lightweight new memory system. I remember we were as doubtful then as you are now. A few years later I remember that moment while switching the micro SD card of a camera… Sometimes this breakthroughs turns out to be exactly as they are told
> Every year or so there's a new article about some new spectacular storage medium. Crystals, graphene, lasers, quartz, holograms, whatever. It never materializes.
Of course, wouldn't you expect that for a fairly mature technology that you'd get tons of false starts from competing tech before eventually getting one breakthrough that completely changed everything? I mean, you could have written a comment that was perfectly analogous to your paragraph above about how AI and neural networks never really amounted to much for about 50-60 years until, all of the sudden, they did (and even if you think AI may currently be overhyped, it's undeniable that in the past 5 years that AI has had an effect on society probably much greater than all the previous history of AI put together).
I prefer to read this academic paper as "Oh, this is a really interesting approach, I wonder what its limitations are" vs. interpreting at as a "this new storage tech will change the world!!!" announcement. I feel like the first approach leads to generally more curiosity, while the second just leads to cynicism and jadedness.
Very large, fast, read-only memory now has an incredible use-case: NN weights.
In fairness, i assume any headline that emphasizes some excessively large storage density is probably at best something useful for archiving and not a replacement for an SSD. If they were targeting latency they would lead with those numbers not the density.
Aren't lasers driving the current 32TB+ HDD tech?
yeah but that wasn't a straight upgrade, either. HAMR has all sorts of tradeoffs.
Every article like this there is someone that points this out. Not hard to do but sure is reliable.
The hard work would be maintaining a database of ideas which were similarly hyped over the past (say) couple centuries - including details on if/when each idea worked out, or fell out of hype-space, or was proven useless.
From that, you might be able to draw useful conclusions. Well...you'd also need correction factors for how profitable the hype itself was, over time, in the various scientific & technical fields.
The business model would be selling db access to VC's, R&D managers, and other folks making decisions about real money.
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.
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.)
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.
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 [emphasis mine].
as part of a longer rant about the AI "memory wall" in the very first section. If we open with a long spiel about how 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?
And, as you point out, 25 PB/s is a lot. Around 1000x that of a typical on-die SRAM cache, I think.
A while later, the author speaks of using atomic force microscopy to read the data back. The size of AFM scans are, in practice, as I understand, along the order of square micrometers. I think this whole paper is an AI-driven, as you put it, 'fever dream', enabling an author to put forth 60 pages of sciencey claims and sciencey math without -- as far as I can tell -- any concrete and novel scientific result of any kind. AI-driven reality warps are not new; the difference is nowdays AIs are good enough at sounding smart to get past the barriers of a typical smart person who might want to be fooled or make a show of being open-minded. Later on, the author proposes using "shaped femtosecond IR pulses" -- without further elaboration -- to address single atoms! IR wavelengths are on the order of a micrometer at minimum!
> Yes, this paper is insane.
Given the amount of AI writing involved, I'm pretty sure that you actually meant "this paper is inane". Or maybe both!
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.
Dude, you _have_ to write things in your own words if you want to be taken seriously. "The <x> is not <y> — it's <z>" will cause a bunch of people to disengage, and those people have high overlap with the people who may fund you.
"Dude, you _have_ to write things in your own words if you want to be taken seriously."
How is this lost on people? Everything that contains the slightest hint of "AI slop" is instantly panned anywhere it appears, and yet people such as Ilia Toli appear to be entirely oblivious to this.
It's tragic. There is at least a non-zero chance that this work is a world changing breakthrough. It's clear, based on his engagement with comments here, that he at least believes this. And yet the first thing the guy does with it is debase it all using a clanker.
It boggles the mind.
We're seeing this throughout academe, in courts with both lawyers and judges, and among lawmakers and journalists. Several times a week one or another of these makes another headline for misapplying "AI". It seems that the work for which we are all expected to have the highest regard is coming from people that are completely witless; both unaware of how transparent this is and unaware of the consequences.
You have to be deeply ensconced inside an impenetrable bubble to do that to yourself.
> You have to be deeply ensconced inside an impenetrable bubble to do that to yourself.
I largely agree with your point, but I’m afraid you are the one in the bubble. Detecting AI writing is a rare skill, not the norm. It’s glaringly obvious to those of us who use AI a lot, but it’s not that obvious to the average person.
To the point of absurdity in cases – I’ve seen loads of people who hate AI complain about AI online, not realising that the account they are talking to is nothing but a simple spam bot.
Yeah, I get that it can be amazing and be of superhuman intelligence and all that, but also it reads exactly like the slop article I saw yesterday that was giving baking instructions for “wood biscuits” (which are a method of joining in cabinetry and are not tasty at all): https://thehoneypotbakery.com/wood-biscuit-size-chart/
Do not match your communication style to nonsense articles.
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Replying to myself, because iliatoli's reply to me was [dead] so fast I couldn't reply to it directly...
"The physics is mine — thirteen years of it, starting from the 2013 paper. I use AI for editing, as I use a calculator for arithmetic. The transition state, the barrier, the molecular model, the fluorine uniqueness argument — all computed on my workstation. The tone criticism is heard and will be addressed in revision. The calculations don't change with the prose."
This is NOT about "prose." You're missing the point. Badly. And damn that's frustrating.
Read carefully and inculcate: Do not use LLM to write anything you expect to be taken seriously. This is not negotiable. It doesn't matter if all your peers and colleagues are doing exactly that. It doesn't matter that this is your first experience with such a reaction: it's not a fluke. DO. NOT. DO. IT.
Am I getting through?
"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.
What do you need to build a demo of Tier 2? I am guessing if you can do that then you can get an investor.
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?
If you could do that at a high writing rate, could it be used for making ICs?
If you could do that at all, let alone high throughput, you could write the future itself.
Using a mid-IR array with sub 10nm resolution is anything but an engineering path. Tech like that has never left the lab afaik.
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.
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.
That’s amazing. Do you have a home lab with an atomic microscope where you do your research?
And what’s the reason for going solo vs a research university, where I assume this type of research could be significantly sped up?
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.
Couldn't you potentially get some smaller grants from each of the fields? Or is that too much paperwork. It always seems so much work to get those grants.
Getting a grant from a single field is already a full-time job; the research typically gets done as overtime.
It's a near full-time job in and of itself, and the nature of them means that you really want to get a grant for something you've already done and use the scraps from it to fund the new stuff.
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.
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.
The journal (Graphene, ASP) ceased operations and the DOI infrastructure went dark. The paper itself is archived at ResearchGate: researchgate.net/publication/258423577. The content is independently verifiable.
I wanted to check the journal where it was published, there are good journals and bad journals.It's very strange that the doi is dead. I found this http://www.aspbs.com/graphene/contents_graphene2013.htm but it's also full of dead links.
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.
Ah, that's interesting. Different countries can be a fair reason I suppose.
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.
Some people actually enjoy studying and learning in these spaces. Does everything have to be optimized for?
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.
3 PhDs is quite some dedication to science, given that a PhD student life is neither that of plenty nor leisure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Patent strategy is under consideration. Happy to discuss offline — ilia.toli@gmail.com.
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."
Big discoveries will speak for themselves.
It's under peer review at Physica Scripta (IOP) since March 25. HN is for visibility, not validation.
It would be interesting to hear back after this passes peer review.
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.
I suppose anyone can run the same computer simulations.
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.
Pardon my ignorance, but why does the "447 TB/cm^2" density value use square centimeters instead of a volume unit? Does the information capacity of this material really scale in proportion to area? How? Or is it just a typo?
fluorographane is a single atomic layer — one carbon thick — so storage density is naturally per unit area. The paper also gives volumetric density for the nanotape spool architecture (0.4–9 ZB/cm³, Section 4.4).
Remarkable. If this material works and is flexible enough, we could someday see tape drives with hundreds of exabytes of capacity.
Author here. The paper describes exactly this — a nanotape spool architecture with volumetric density of 0.4–9 ZB/cm³. Section 4.4 in the preprint.
Perhaps title had a typo?
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
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.
TIL thanks!
Fluorographane: Synthesis and Properties (pdf)https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/getauthorversionpdf/C4CC0884...
Looks interesting but cant take it seriously when there are so many red flags of LLM style writing. The author continues to use AI to even reply to comments in this thread. (its not X its Y, Em Dashes, etc.)
Fluorographane is that stuff in factorio space age, no?
The Now I Get non-technical version, because I need someone to explain this to me x)
https://nowigetit.us/pages/d7f94fd0-e608-47f9-8805-429898105...
This is like making the big companies lose their profit money since they still have their old products in their warehouses why would they want this tech to come that's why it never materializes
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as proven by the number of comments treating the paper as an AI slop pipe dream.
I don’t understand the comments here. They say in the last paragraph:
> 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.
Are we supposed to read all these stories as lies?
Now it doesn’t say that this is easy to produce, but if those claims are true, it doesn’t really matter if it is very expensive.
It doesn’t say either if the stuff can withstand live conditions.
It’s annoying not to be able to trust whether solutions like these are viable or not.
The scanning-probe claim is real — C-AFM on fluorographane is achievable with existing commercial instruments. The paper is a computational prediction with a detailed experimental protocol. An experimental collaborator is preparing the validation now. The 'live conditions' question is addressed in Section 5 (radiation hardness, mechanical damage, defect physics).
By itself the density of such a system would just be an interesting superlative: the paper itself references people who have achieved similar densities in the lab, but it's not necessarily useful if the read and write are slow and the total addressable area is miniscule: both things I would expect from the described proof-of-concept (the main point of which would be to demonstrate that the storage works at all, and maybe to evaluate its robustness to some degree).
You should not expect that even the best of ideas at this stage are going to turn into products on any reasonable timescale, this is at a super early level of development and there are probable more things that can go wrong than you are imagining. But the paper shows there has been a good amount of effort at this stage to evaluate the robustness of the storage: the whole reason for this particular arrangement seems to be that it's pretty robust while still being writable. (though anything nanoscale is not something you're going to be able to handle directly)
Too long, not gonna read. When do I get my 447TB iPhone?
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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.
[1]: https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1991/06/23/holograms-the-ne...
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.
This is research...
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".
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12397490/
Do you think it’s logically sound to marry the ”no true Scotsman” to a strawman argument?
Or, to imply guilt by association by first constructing a false stereotype of research in one field, and then applying it onto an instance of research in another field?
I mean battery breakthroughs are real though? BYD is now demoing 0-80% in 5 mins on production vehicles in China.
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.
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 wholesale electricity service plan adding another say 100kWh probably works out.
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.