Storing data in a single atom proved possible by IBM researchers
The fundamental components of computers are becoming small enough that they are pressing against the boundaries of the familiar world of Newtonian physics. And nowhere is the scale and precision of operation on better display than in hard disk drives, where a trillion bits may fit in a square inch. But IBM has outdone them all by reading and writing data to a single atom.
This advance may be more symbolic than practical right now, but merely showing a working example of atomic data storage, orders of magnitude smaller than state of the art techniques, is practically science fiction.
Atoms, it may not surprise you to hear, are pretty much the smallest unit of matter that we can manipulate reliably and expect to stay still. There are interesting experiments with entangling photons, but they’re squirrelly customers. Better to stick to things that don’t fire off at the speed of light if you lose your grip for a second. And a previous atomic storage technique doesn’t actually store data in the atom, but moves them around to form readable patterns (still cool).
