Researchers create a kilobyte of rewritable atom-sized memory

Several submissions of this item:

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

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

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

Which will win the race for votes?

open arXiv version from April: 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.