Researchers from Delft University in the Netherlands have discovered a way to store data on a single atom.
This should drastically reduce the space and energy currently needed to store data, reports Winbuzzer.
Due to the roughness of the material used, the smallest writable element currently contains thousands of atoms. To bypass this, researchers at Delft Institute of Technology have used chlorine atoms on a copper surface, which form a square grid.
Each atom can be moved using the needle of a scanning tunneling microscope, meaning that if one atom is missing, the hole in the grid can be transported. Multiple holes are then arranged to form bits.
However, there are a couple of drawbacks that may prevent you from using this new hard drive in your home PC in the near future.
Currently, researchers are only reading and writing 1 KB of data at a time, and in order for the data to be readable the memory has to be in a vacuum and stored at extremely low temperatures.
You can read more about the breakthrough here.
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