A new material could form the basis for the next generation of digital storage.

A paper published in the latest edition of Applied Physics Letters says researchers have created an environmentally-friendly electronically-reactive alloy consisting of 50 aluminium atoms bound to 50 atoms of antimony. The '50-50' material has been developed to store information in the form of ‘phase-change memory’.

Phase-change storage relies on materials that change from a disordered, amorphous structure to a perfectly aligned, crystalline formation when electricity is applied. Pulses can be used to create a rapid succession of changes from high resistance in its amorphous state to low resistance in its crystalline phase. The two phases correspond to the 1 and 0 states of binary data.

The technology has a number of advantages over traditional flash memory, including the ability to be packed into about half the space as is physically possible for flash. Beating this limitation means that more units of phase-change memory can be crammed into valuable nanometres: “that's the most important feature of this kind of memory,” said researcher Xilin Zhou. He also says manufacturing and data transfer would be considerably faster and more efficient.

Phase-change progress has been prompted by a team at the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In their experiments researchers also found a third distinct state of resistance in one compound, leading to the suggestion it could be used to store three bits of data in a single memory cell, instead of just two; further expanding the levels of data retention.

Details of the futuristic storage medium are available here.