Appl. Phys. Lett. doi:10.1063/1.3463470 (2010)

Data have been recorded on a tiny slice of a metal oxide at a density eight times that offered by today's most advanced magnetic disk drives.

In magnetic data storage, data are written to disk by a magnetic read-and-write head that changes the magnetization of a region a few hundred nanometres across. One option for boosting memory in ever-shrinking electronics is to use ferroelectric materials, in which data can be encoded in the polarization of smaller regions.

Kenkou Tanaka and Yasuo Cho at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, recorded 64 × 64 bits of real data at a spacing of 12.8 nanometres per bit on a crystalline slice of lithium tantalate. This amounts to a density of 0.6 trillion bits per square centimetre.