Boffins unveil 500TB/in² disk. Yeah, it's made of chlorine. -196˚C, why?

A team of researchers led by Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) have managed to devise a new method in atomic memory which could potentially outperform state-of-the-art hard disk drives by “three orders of magnitude”.

The imperfections are vital for the hard disk, as a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) interprets a vacancy to the left and right of a chlorine atom as a 0 and 1 respectively.

At although the atomic hard disk has a storage density 500 times greater than the best commercial hard disks used today, there is a high price to pay for its stability. The hard disk has to be stored at -196˚C to control the vacancy positions in the lattice.