There is a growing trend to store more of our data in large data centres using cloud computing resources. Indeed, the amount of data produced by humans increases by more than one billion gigabytes per day. Thus, it is necessary to construct continually more data centres, the running of which consumes large amounts of energy. In order to maintain the capacity of storage media in pace with demand, it is necessary to reduce the amount of space that each piece of information occupies. However, there are limits to how small we can go, due to the roughness of the materials used for data storage, meaning that thousands of atoms are necessary to specify each piece of information. However, if the material could be made smooth, down to the level of individual atoms, it might be possible for each data element to consist of just a single atom. Researchers at Delft University of Technology have achieved precisely this, by placing chlorine atoms on a copper surface, to form a perfect square grid. At particular locations on the grid, there is a chlorine atom missing, leaving a hole. Using the tip of a scanning tunnelling electron microscope (STEM), it is possible to move another chlorine atom into the hole from elsewhere in the grid.
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