If you've been hankering for a multi-terabyte USB thumb drive, you may be in luck: IBM scientists have developed a technique that could — eventually — help increase data-storage densities by orders of magnitude.

The breakthrough, announced Friday, allows researchers to measure how long a bit of information can be retained in an individual atom. It does so by capturing, recording, and visualizing the magnetic properties of that atom in real time.

Using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to essentially record a "movie" of an atom's magnetic behavior, that behavior can now be analyzed at frame rates one million times faster than before, according to researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San José, California — down to a nanosecond time frame.

And as Andreas Heinrich, a physicist at the Almaden center pointed out: "To put this in perspective, one nanosecond to one second is the equivalent of one second to 30 years."

"This technique developed by the IBM Research team is a very important new capability for characterizing small structures and understanding what is happening at fast time scales," said Michael Crommie, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Crommie noted that such knowledge of atomic-level activity could lead to advancements in photovoltaics, and the Almaden researchers added quantum computing to the nascent fields that could benefit from the technique.

Sebastian Loth of IBM Research, a coauthor of the paper announcing the new technique, published in the current issue of Science, is interested in the advances in storage technology made possible by the STM probe: "This breakthrough allows us — for the first time — to understand how long information can be stored in an individual atom," he said.

With this new knowledge in hand, storage-device designers could, according to the researchers, "engineer the magnetic lifetime of the atoms to make them longer (to retain their magnetic state) or shorter (to switch to a new magnetic state) as needed to create future spintronic devices" in which a single atom could hold a single bit.

For a layman's-level explanation of how the technique works, check out IBM's press release. For a deep-geek dive into the details, you can purchase a copy of the Science article, "Measurement of Fast Electron Spin Relaxation Times with Atomic Resolution," here. ®