Diamonds may hold the key to storing vast amounts of data.
Store your digital data in diamonds forever.
Researchers in Japan have created a pure, lightweight diamond for use in quantum computing, a move that could lead to new types of hard drives. It’s part of an ongoing effort to harness the strange effects of quantum mechanics to hold information.
"Unlike our classical computers that operate on binary digits (or 'bits') — that is, zeros and ones — quantum computers use 'qubits' that can be in a linear combination of two states," David Bader, a computer science professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who studies quantum memory, told Lifewire in an email interview. "Storing qubits is more challenging than storing classical bits because qubits cannot be cloned, are error-prone, and have a short lifetime of a fraction of a second."
Researchers have long hypothesized that diamonds could be used as a quantum storage medium. The crystal structures could be used to store data as qubits if they could be made nearly nitrogen-free. However, the manufacturing process is complex and so far the diamonds that have been created are too small for practical purposes.
