Writing the future of rewritable memory

Scientists at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada have created the most dense, solid-state memory in history that could soon exceed the capabilities of current hard drives by 1,000 times.

Faced with the question of how to respond to the ever-increasing needs of our data-driven society, the answer for a team of scientists was simple: more memory, less space. Finding the way to do that, however, was anything but simple, involving years of painstaking incremental advances in atomic-scale nanotechnology.

But their new discovery for atomic-scale rewritable memory—quickly removing or replacing single atoms—allows the creation of small, stable, dense memory attheatomic-scale.

"Essentially, you can take all 45 million songs on iTunes and store them on the surface of one quarter," said Roshan Achal,Ph.D. student in Department of Physics at the University of Alberta and lead author on the new research. "Five years ago, this wasn't even something we thought possible."