Come to think of it, this means that in principle IBM could store data at one bit per atom starting now. Perhaps the biggest difficulty would be finding the data again.
I guess this is the lower limit to data storage. I doubt that subatomic storage will ever be possible. Probably, archival storage in DNA will become practical before storage in individual atoms does. As I mentioned before, all of the data in world would fit into roughly 6 ml of DNA. A prof. at Harvard has stored and reproduced data in DNA -- a copy of his own textbook. The techniques are too slow and expensive to be competitive today. I believe they are derived from technology used in the human genome project. An unexpected spin-off. - Jed
