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fliptop [soylentnews.org] writes:

Can you fit the entire Library of Congress on a cube smaller than a dust mite? A team of nanoscientists Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands says, "Yes" [popularmechanics.com]:

By scooting around individual chlorine atoms on a flat sheet of copper, the scientists could write a 1 kilobyte message at 500 terabits per square inch. That's around 100 times more info per square inch than the most efficient hard drive ever created. Otte says the method could theoretically fit every book ever written onto a flat copper sheet the size of a postage stamp. The new storage device is outlined today [nature.com] in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

[...] Here's how it's done: [research leader Sander] Otte's team found that they could put chlorine atoms onto a cold grid of copper metal and get them to form into perfect squares. Think of it like a checkerboard. Any empty spot that was missing a chlorine atom would like a dark square on Otte's checkerboard. Next, the researchers found they could scoot around the chlorine atoms on this grid, sort of like a sliding block puzzle, and thus rearrange where the dark spots on the grid are. It's done with a tool called a scanning tunnelling microscope, which is a bit like an ultra-thin needle that can nudge atoms up and down, left and right.

[...] To create the data storage device, Otte starts with a copper plate that's been randomly peppered with chlorine atoms, leaving plenty of blank spaces. He then scoots around the atoms until he's formed a larger 12-by-12 grid with chunks of ordered atoms and darker blank spaces. If any of these 144 chunks has some fatal error—say the copper underneath has some elemental impurity—Otte can mark off that box as defective with a tiny 4-atom symbol in its upper left-hand corner.

The arrangement of atoms and blank spaces translates to individual bits of data. A blank space followed by a chlorine atom is a 0, while the reverse (a chlorine atom and then a blank space) is a 1.

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