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

https://zenodo.org/records/19513269

47•iliatoli•1h ago

Comments

jmyeet•33m ago

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...

mkprc•32m ago

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.

iliatoli•28m ago

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.

_alternator_•20m ago

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.

iliatoli•15m ago

It's under peer review at Physica Scripta (IOP) since March 25. HN is for visibility, not validation.

tux3•9m ago

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.

iliatoli•6m ago

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.

ricardobeat•9m ago

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?

iliatoli•7m ago

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.

hgoel•5m ago

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.

iliatoli•3m ago

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.

hgoel•2m ago

Ah, that's interesting. Different countries can be a fair reason I suppose.

ilaksh•8m ago

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.

aperrien•27m ago

Remarkable. If this material works and is flexible enough, we could someday see tape drives with hundreds of exabytes of capacity.

iliatoli•21m ago

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.

est•13m ago

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

iliatoli•11m ago

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.

est•8m ago

TIL thanks!

Animats•12m ago

"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.

iliatoli•10m ago

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.

ilaksh•5m ago

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.

iliatoli•2m ago

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.

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