All books in the world could fit on a hard disk the size of a stamp – ElEspectador.com

In 1959, the American physicist Richard Feynman delivered his famous lecture There’s plenty of room at the bottom (There’s plenty of room at the bottom) where he stated that if we a platform in which they could arrange individual atoms in an orderly pattern, it would be possible to store a piece of information in an atom.

Now your dream has come true. A team of scientists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the University of Delft (Netherlands) has managed to build a memory of 1 kilobyte (8,000 bits), where c ada bit is represented by the position of a single atom chlorine on a copper surface.

In addition, in honor of the visionary Feynman, researchers have coded a few paragraphs of the conference Feynman in a space of 100 nanometers wide. For this, they used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), whose tip is able to observe atoms and move them one by one to the desired location.

“You could compare it to a puzzle, “says Sander Otte, the scientist who led the research, published this week in Nature Nanotechnology. “Each bit consists of two positions on the surface of copper atoms, so that one chlorine atom is slidable back and forth between these two positions”.

“If the chlorine atom is in the upper position, there is a hole underneath it, and correspond to a bit 1 adds the expert. If the hole is in the upper position, and therefore, the chlorine atom is in the bottom, then the bit is a 0 “.

As the chlorine atoms are surrounded by other atoms of the same element, except near the holes, are held in place. For this reason the method of the holes is much more stable than previous ones with loose atoms, besides being best suited for data storage , according to the authors.

every day more than one billion gigabytes of new data in our technological society are generated and to store such information is increasingly important that each bit occupy the smallest possible space. Scientists from the Kavli Institute have succeeded in bringing the reduction to the limit: build a memory of 1 kilobyte (8,000 bits), where each bit is represented by the position of a single chlorine atom

“In theory. this storage density allow all l you books that has been created by humanity could be written in a single postage stamp “said Otte.

Specifically, scientists they reached a storage density of 500 terabits per square inch (Tbpsi), 500 times greater than the best commercial hard drive currently available.

One of the limitations of the device is operating at very low temperatures, but also improves the achievements so far. Today temperatures are needed in the range of liquid helium (4 kelvins) for stable configurations , and changing the position of a single atom requires rebuilding the entire work surface.

However, Otte and his colleagues, among which is the Spanish Joaquín Fernández Rossier, have managed to preserve the positions of more than 8,000 vacancies chlorine (where missing atoms) for more than 40 hours at 77 degrees Kelvin . When defining a binary alphabet based on positions vacant or free positions, they can be stored on the surface different texts, such as the fragment conference Feynman, and then modify it at will bit by bit.

 The speed of writing and reading is still slow (several minutes) in this device, which will have to be optimized before it can be applied in everyday technology, but these results demonstrate that you can create memories data storage exceeding great as the current hard disks.