All the books in the world on small chip

EVERY single book ever written could soon be stored on a computer chip the size of a postage stamp, according to new research.

Scientists have developed a method of storing data that is 500 times more space-efficient than current on-theshelf hard-discs.

The only problem is that for the technique to work, a temperature of almost -200°C (-328F) must be reached in a near-perfect vacuum.

Despite this, the scientists believe that further development of the ground-breaking technique could massively reduce the size of our ever growing need for vast data centres.

More than a billion gigabytes of new data is created every day in the modern world, so reducing the size of that data is a key priority.

The team at Delft University in Holland managed to create a computer chip consisting of one kilobyte (8,000 bits) where each bit is represented by the position of a single chlorine atom.

Lead-scientist Sander Otte said: “In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp.”

The work was inspired in part by a 1959 lecture from the New York-born physicist Richard Feynman entitled There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.

As a tribute, Professor Otte and his team coded part of the lecture on an area 100 nanometres wide.

During the study, which is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the team used a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM), in which a needle is able to probe atoms on a surface.

Prof Otte said: “Every bit consists of two positions on a surface of copper atoms, and one chlorine atom that we can slide back and forth between these two positions.

“If the chlorine atom is in the top position, there is a hole beneath it - this a one.

“If the hole is in the top position and the chlorine atom is on the bottom, then the bit is a zero.”