Stanford University announced a breakthrough with the potential to vastly increase digital data storage. Researchers at the university demonstrated the ability to assemble subatomic sized bits as small as 0.3 nanometers, or roughly one third of a billionth of a meter. The team used a scanning tunneling microscope to drag single carbon monoxide molecules into a desired pattern on a copper chip the size of a fingernail.
A two-dimensional “molecular holograms” were created not by using laser light as in a traditional hologram but by the electrons that are already in the copper. The recorded information could be read by the scanning tunneling microscope.
A paper on this topic has been published online in the journal Nature Nanotechnology,
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2009/january28/small-012809.html
