Scientists Claim Big Leap In Nanoscale Storage by Stephen Lawson

Nanotechnology researchers say they have achieved a breakthrough that could fit the contents of 250 DVDs on a coin-sized surface and might also have implications for displays and solar cells.

The scientists, from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, discovered a way to make certain kinds of molecules line up in perfect arrays over relatively large areas. The results of their work will appear Friday in the journal Science, according to a UC Berkeley press release. One of the researchers said the technology might be commercialized in less than 10 years, if industry is motivated.

More densely packed molecules could mean more data packed into a given space, higher-definition screens and more efficient photovoltaic cells, according to scientists Thomas Russell and Ting Xu. This could transform the microelectronics and storage industries, they said. Russell is director of the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Amherst and a visiting professor at Berkeley, and Xu is a Berkeley assistant professor in Chemistry and Materials Sciences and Engineering.

Russell and Xu discovered a new way to create block copolymers, or chemically dissimilar polymer chains that join together by themselves. Polymer chains can join up in a precise pattern equidistant from each other, but research over the past 10 years has found that the patterns break up as scientists try to make the pattern cover a larger area.

Russell and Xu used commercially available, man-made sapphire crystals to guide the polymer chains into precise patterns. Heating the crystals to between 1,300 and 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,372 to 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit) creates a pattern of sawtooth ridges that they used to guide the assembly of the block copolymers. With this technique, the only limit to the size of an array of block copolymers is the size of the sapphire, Xu said.

Once a sapphire is heated up and the pattern is created, the template could be reused. Both the crystals and the polymer chains could be obtained commercially, Xu said.

"Every ingredient we use here is nothing special," Xu said.

The scientists said they achieved a storage density of 10Tb (125GB) per square inch, which is 15 times the density of past solutions, with no defects. With this density, the data stored on 250 DVDs could fit on a surface the size of a U.S. quarter, which is 25.26 millimeters in diameter, the researchers said. It might also be possible to achieve a high-definition picture with 3-nanometer pixels, potentially as large as a stadium JumboTron, Xu said. Another possibility is more dense photovoltaic cells that capture the sun's energy more efficiently.

Russell and Xu's approach differs from how other researchers have been trying to increase storage density. Most have been using optical lithography, which sends light through a mask onto a photosensitive surface. That process creates a pattern to guide the copolymers into assembling.

The new technology could create chip features just 3nm across, far outstripping current microprocessor manufacturing techniques, which at their best create features about 45nm across. Photolithography is running into basic barriers to achieving greater density, and the new approach uses less environmentally harmful chemicals, Xu said. But actually applying the technique to CPUs would pose some challenges, such as the need to create random patterns on a CPU, Xu said.

Among other things, such a leap ahead in storage density could alter either the amount of content that a person could carry with them or the quality of media delivered on discs, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight64. For example, it might allow movies to turn into holograms, he said.

"Just when we think we're so technically sophisticated in what we can do, along comes somebody with a notion like this, which has the potential to fundamentally change economics in so many different areas," Brookwood said.

Ultra-high-definition displays have less practical potential, according to IDC analyst Tom Mainelli. The image and video standards of today, including those used in HDTV, couldn't take advantage of a display with 3nm pixels, he said. And when it comes to monitors, price is king.

"You could see how there would be a value to that level of precision (in an area like medical imaging) ... but are we talking about a [US]$10,000 display?" Mainelli said.

Insight64's Brookwood said the technology, for which Berkeley and Amherst have applied for a patent, harkens back to fundamental breakthroughs that created the IT industry, he said.

"It's this kind of basic materials research that has created the opportunities that have made Silicon Valley and American manufacturing great," Brookwood said. "The last few years (in the U.S.), there have been fewer and fewer people working on this level of basic stuff," he said.

Obama's Intelligence Blunder by Jon Chait

Most of President Obama's "missteps" to date have been Washington peccadilloes of the "let's find something to complain about" sort. But Obama has made one major mistake that has attracted little public attention: his appointment of Charles Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Freeman was attacked by pro-Israel activists, but the contretemps over Freeman's view of Israel misses the broader problem, which is that he's an ideological fanatic.

That may sound like an odd description for a respectable bureaucrat and impeccable establishmentarian such as Freeman. What's more, he's not an ideologue of the sort who draws most of the attention. When most people think of foreign policy ideology, they mean neoconservatism, which dominated the Bush administration. Broadly speaking, neoconservatism is obsessed with the moral differences between democracies and non-democracies. At its most simplistic (which, alas, it nearly always is) neoconservatism means supporting the "good guys" and fighting the "bad guys." As most of us have seen, neoconservatism has trouble recognizing that the good guys aren't perfectly good and that the bad guys aren't comic book villains.

Freeman belongs to the camp that's the mortal enemy of the neoconservatives: the realists. Realist ideology pays no attention to moral differences between states. As far as realists are concerned, there's no way to think about the way governments act except as the pursuit of self-interest. Realism has some useful insights. For instance, realists accurately predicted that Iraqis would respond to a U.S. invasion with less than unadulterated joy.

But realists are the mirror image of neoconservatives in that they are completely blind to the moral dimensions of international politics. Realists scoffed at Bill Clinton's interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, which halted mass slaughter. Realists tend not to abide the American alliance with Israel, which rests on shared values with a fellow imperfect democracy rather than on a cold analysis of America's interests.

Taken to extremes, realism's blindness to morality can lead it wildly astray. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, both staunch realists, wrote "The Israel Lobby," a hyperbolic attack on Zionist political influence. The central error of their thesis was that, since America's alliance with Israel does not advance American interests, it could be explained only by sinister lobbying influence. They seemed unable to grasp even the possibility that Americans, rightly or wrongly, have an affinity for a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships. Consider, perhaps, if eunuchs tried to explain the way teenage boys act around girls.

Freeman praised "The Israel Lobby" while indulging in its characteristic paranoia. "No one else in the United States has dared to publish this article," he told a Saudi news service in 2006, "given the political penalties that the lobby imposes on those who criticize it." In fact, the article was printed as a book the next year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York.

The most extreme manifestation of Freeman's realist ideology came out in a leaked e-mail he sent to a foreign policy Internet mailing list. Freeman wrote that his only problem with what most of us call "the Tiananmen Square Massacre" was an excess of restraint:

"[T]he truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than -- as would have been both wise and efficacious -- to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo's response to the mob scene at 'Tian'anmen' stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action. . . .

"I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans' 'Bonus Army' or a 'student uprising' on behalf of 'the goddess of democracy' should expect to be displaced with despatch [sic] from the ground they occupy."

This is the portrait of a mind so deep in the grip of realist ideology that it follows the premises straight through to their reductio ad absurdum. Maybe you suppose the National Intelligence Council job is so technocratic that Freeman's rigid ideology won't have any serious consequences. But think back to the neocon ideologues whom Bush appointed to such positions. That didn't work out very well, did it?