A device that uses arrangements of atoms to encode and store information has orders of magnitude more capacity than current hard drives.

Sander Otte at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and his colleagues assembled arrays of chlorine atoms on a nanometre-sized copper surface. They used a scanning tunnelling microscope to manipulate the atoms and vacant spaces on the surface, creating many different arrangements that encode information. The researchers used these arrays to build a 1-kilobyte rewritable data-storage device with an information density as high as 78 terabits per square centimetre.

If the device were scaled up, it could store the entire US Library of Congress in a cube just 100 micrometres wide, according to the authors.

Nature Nanotech. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2016.131 (2016)