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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

When you get down to the single atom level, atoms which are magnetic, no longer remain stable. "What defines a permanent magnet is that it has a north and a south pole, which remains in the same orientation," professor of Scanning Probe Microscopy Alexander Khajetoorians explains, "But when you get down to a single atom, the north and south pole of the atom start to flip and do not know what direction they should point, as they become extremely sensitive to their surroundings. If you want a magnetic atom to hold information, it cannot flip. For the last ten years researchers have been asking: in order for the atom to stop flipping, how many atoms are needed to stabilize the magnet, and how long can it hold it information before it flips again? In the last two years, scientists in Lausanne and at IBM Almaden have figured out how to keep the atom from flipping, showing that a single atom can be a memory. To do this, researchers had to use very low temperatures, 40 Kelvin or -233 degrees Celsius. This technology is limited to extremely low temperature."

Scientists at Radboud University took a different approach. By choosing a special substrate – semiconducting black phosphorus -, they discovered a new way to store information within single cobalt atoms, that bypasses the conventional problems with instability. Using a scanning tunneling microscope, where a sharp metal tip moves across their surface just a few atoms away, they could "see" single cobalt atoms on the surface of black phosphorus. Because of the extremely high resolution and the special properties of the material, they directly showed that the single cobalt atoms could be manipulated into one of two bit states.
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Right now, the elements that store hard drive bits are still a thousand times bigger than an atom. Khajetoorians: "What this work means is that, if we could construct a real hard drive from all these atoms – and we are still a long way from that – you could store thousands of times more information."

Hardware manufacturers are gonna have to fight electric vehicles for the world's supply of cobalt.

Original Submission