Matamec's Kipawa Deposit contains Holmium, the Heavy Rare Earth Element Essential to New Storage Technology that Allows for 1000x More Data to be Stored than Ever Before
MONTREAL, QUEBEC--(Marketwired - Mar 15, 2017) - Matamec Explorations Inc. ("Matamec" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE:MAT)(OTCQB:MHREF) welcomes the recent discovery by a team of nano-science researchers, mainly from IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, of the ability to store one bit (1b) of data on a single holmium (Ho) atom. The breakthrough findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature earlier this month (cf. Nature, vol. 543 pp. 226-228, 9 March 2017).
The researchers were able to use a single holmium atom as the "world's smallest magnet," and by passing an electrical current through the holmium, they can turn it "on" to a state representing the "1" of the binary code, or "off", which represents the "0" state.
The researchers basically demonstrated that two magnetic holmium atoms could be switched on or off independently, even when they were separated by just one nanometer - a distance one millionth the width of a pin head. With so little space needed to store data, the discovery could lead to the creation of radically smaller hard drives and data storage systems with much greater capacities for storage - about 1,000 times denser than today's hard disk drives and solid state memory chips.
Holmium (Ho - atomic number 67) is a heavy rare earth element (HREE) that is part of the Lanthanide series of elements. Matamec's Kipawa Rare Earths JV, its flagship project being developed in partnership with Ressources Qubec, is one of North America's most advanced rare earths projects. The Kipawa deposit features light and heavy rare earth elements (REEs), and is enriched in heavies, including holmium. The project is at the development stage and when in production is expected to produce 31.2 tonnes of Holmium oxide per year on average for the life of mine, as shown in the feasibility study report for the Kipawa Deposit, filed on SEDAR in October 2013. Matamec's Kipawa Project has successfully generated a light and a heavy rare earth concentrate and continues to improve the metallurgical process with research labs and universities, mostly in Canada.
"It's very exciting to hear about this technology breakthrough and to imagine the ramifications for data storage applications," said Andr Gauthier, Matamec's President and CEO. "As we continue working with leading universities and research centres on several fronts to explore ways to improve the overall project at Kipawa, knowing that there will most likely be an increased demand for holmium in the coming years as a result of possibly groundbreaking new applications certainly is encouraging. Our main objective at Matamec is to develop the Kipawa project to provide a secure North American supply of rare earths, including holmium."
Although it may take time for the many possible commercial applications to come to market, the discovery of the ability to save a single bit of data on a holmium atom represents a quantum leap in data storage technology and offers great potential for computing. An entire computer's hard drive could possibly be stored in a piece of jewelry or sewn into a garment, for example, and smaller data storage devices could greatly improve the evolving "internet of things" applications, where more and more everyday items can be connected to the Internet.
Eliza Ngai, M.Eng, P.Eng, Metallurgist of the Company and Al Hayden, P.Eng, Consulting Metallurgical Engineer for the Kipawa project, are the qualified persons according to the NI 43-101 standard, and are responsible for the technical content of this press release.