A collaboration between the Dutch University TU Delft and INL leads to the fabrication of a laboratory prototype of digital memory with atomic-scale bits that outperforms the storage density of current technologies by a factor of 500. The results were published in Nature Nanotechnology A kilobyte rewritable atomic memory (authors: F. E. Kalff, M. P. Rebergen, E. Fahrenfort, J. Girovsky, R. Toskovic, J. L. Lado, J. Fernández-Rossier & A. F. Otte) Every day, modern society creates more than a billion gigabytes of new data. To store all this data, it is increasingly important that each single bit occupies as little space as possible. A team of scientists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University, in collaboration with the theory group at INL, managed to bring this reduction to the ultimate limit: a memory of 1 kilobyte (8,000 bits), where each bit is represented by the position of one single chlorine atom. “In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single postage stamp”, says lead-scientist Sander Otte, from TU Delft. Records The fabricated memory breaks several records. “It is, by far, the largest structure fabricated by assembling atoms 1 […]
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