
Researchers create a kilobyte of rewritable atom-sized memory - Rafert
http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2016.131.html
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CarolineW
Several submissions of this item:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116615)
(gizmodo.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116577)
(sciencenewsline.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12116127)
(wsj.com)

Which will win the race for votes?

------
flashingleds
open arXiv version from April:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02265](https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02265)

Figure 3 is absolutely spectacular, and deserves to be admired by the whole
world.

A comment on the inevitable promises of revolutionized data storage: Yes the
areal density is fantastically high (>500Tbit / square inch as opposed to
1Tbit/in^2 in bleeding edge HDDs / NAND flash). But it requires ultrahigh
vacuum, preparation of a clean copper crystal, dosing with copper chloride and
then writing/reading with a scanning tunneling microscope, maintaining liquid
nitrogen temperature.

Also a modern SSD will write about 500MB in a second, while this method would
write 500MB in 240 years.

I don't mean to slag it off; we should all appreciate it for being an
absolutely wonderful and awe inspiring technical feat. Just don't get carried
away dreaming of the applications in your laptop/server/phone.

