(ORDO NEWS) — Don’t throw away your hard drives, SSDs, and RAID arrays just yet, but a company specializing in precision industrial gem-based tools has partnered with researchers at Japan‘s Saga University to create a diamond wafer that is clean enough and large enough to be used in quantum computing applications. computing, including mind-boggling memory capacity.
While we marvel at the possibility of holding 4TB of data in the palm of your hand, storage breakthroughs looming on the distant horizon will make the tiny jumps in capacity we see year after year seem trivial.
Quantum computing is still in its infancy, perhaps even in the womb, but holds incredible promise when it comes to computing power (you can read our full explanation of quantum computing here), which applies to data storage as well.
However, there are many obstacles to be overcome, including the search for suitable materials to create such systems.
Diamond has great potential as a storage medium for quantum computing due to a structural defect known as a nitrogen vacancy center that can be used to store data in the form of qubits (short for quantum bit) at room temperature, but the process used to produce diamonds in a laboratory , is dependent on nitrogen, and too much nitrogen in the final product can interfere with its ability to store qubits reliably.
For diamonds to be used in quantum computing, they must be incredibly pure, with a nitrogen concentration of less than three parts per billion.
To date, diamond wafers with this level of purity are limited to just four millimeters, making them too small for practical applications.
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