MAKING MEMORY

The church (or pipe) organ is one of the oldest instruments still used in European music, and has a fascinating history stretching back to Ancient Greece and a chap called Ctesibius of Alexandria in 3rd century BCE. It then took until the 19th century for it to be displaced as the most complex man-made device by the telephone exchange. It’s also a metaphor we weren’t expecting to hear from a professor of physics talking about his new invention.

But this isn’t a story about church organs. It’s about quantum resonant tunnelling, III-V materials, and how they enable a new form of data storage device that could