You can't ever be too thin - Researchers create graphite memory only 10 atoms thick

ComputerWorld - December 18, 2008, by Lucas Mearian

Graphene memory is impervious to radiation

Researchers at Rice University have demonstrated a new data storage medium made out of a layer of graphite only 10 atoms thick.

The technology could potentially provide many times the capacity of current flash memory and withstand temperatures of 200 degrees Celsius and radiation that would make solid-state disk memory disintegrate.

The team, lead by professor James Tour, included postdoctoral researchers Yubao Li and Alexander Sinitskii. In an interview, Tour said laboratory tests started a year and a half ago but his team only recently published a paper on the results.

Laboratory tests showed that they were able to grow graphene, which technically is 10 or fewer layers of graphite, atop silicon and use it to store a bit of data. The sheets were roughly 5 nanometers in diameter. Graphene is a form of carbon.

"Though we grow it from the vapor phase, this material is just like graphite in a pencil. You slide these right off the end of your pencil onto paper. If you were to place Scotch tape over it and pull up, you can sometimes pull up as small as one sheet of graphene. It is a little under 1 nanometer thick," Tour said.

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