Single Atom Storage Made Possible Through CD-R-Like Formatting

A single atom hard drive has been created by scientists through manipulating interactions between two atoms. The device is capable of storing hundreds of information per square inch compared to current available technologies for data storage. The hard drive published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, is capable of holding one kilobyte of memory, approximately equal to a paragraph of text. 

The single atom hard drive is in working prototype. The prototype was built by scientists using a peppered flat copper bed with 60,000 chlorine atoms scattered randomly leaving about 8,000 empty space. A mapping algorithm guided the high tech microscope to gently pull each chlorine atom to create a specific set of atom arrangements and holes with a specific language. The data stored is encoded in patterns of holes between atoms. When the needle tugs the atoms reading them as ones and zeroes, it transforms it into a binary code. 

A professor emeritus of physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Franz Himpsel, said that the technology may not sound impressive, but calls it a breakthrough. Dr. Himpsel is not part of the research study, Science Mag reported. However, Dr. Himpsel said that previous attempts at encoding information, including his own, using atoms could be stored only once. To store new information, it had to be reformatted like CD-Rs used in the early 90s.

The single atom hard drive can rewrite data as much as possible, according to Sander Otte an experimental physicist at Delft University of Technology in Netherlands and author of the research paper, Tech Crunch reported. It was first tested by storing a portion of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" text on the device. It was then replaced the text with 160 word from Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture on imagining a world powered by devices running on data stored at an atomic scale.

The single atom hard drive has been set with instructions that cues the software where to direct the needle to write and read data being stored. It is a part of a decades long research attempting to minimize electronics up to the atomic level. This led researchers into the thinking that it would efficiently store more information in lesser space and cheaper costs. Tech companies are currently building data centers the size of warehouses to store billions of daily uploads of videos, photos, and posts client's post on the Internet. International Business Machines Corp and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company have explored the studies on reducing space needs.