Can you believe that the smallest hard drive made possible now is in the form of a single atom? Scientists from the IBM research in California have developed this proof-of-concept approach where your entire song library in iTunes or thousands of photos stored on an external hard drive can fit in drives the size of a credit card. This is the dream of a team of IBM scientists who have built what they say is the world's smallest ever magnet, which uses a single atom to store information.

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How does the operation of normal hard drive work on an atomic level? IBM scientist said that the storing of a single bit of data, which is a 1 or a 0, in an atom was done through magnetizing the atom, cooling it with helium, and storing it in an extreme vacuum. Researchers made used of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope, which is a Nobel-Prize winning instrument, to push electrons through their barriers and study electronics at the atomic scale. This causes the atom to switch its magnetic state. It was used specifically to manipulate a holmium atom to be free from air molecules and other types of contamination and adding stability to the magnetic reading and writing process by applying liquid helium cooling.

It is the first time that a nanoscale hard drive has been fit into a single atom.

Christopher Lutz, a researcher at IBM, said that this experiment was conducted to understand what happens when you shrink technology down to the most fundamental extreme - the atomic scale.

The researchers wrote that the high magnetic stability combined with electrical reading and writing shows that single-atom magnetic memory is indeed possible.  Although this advancement is still far from being made available to the public, researchers conveyed the possibilities of it coming to realization. Currently, they are working on making this commercially available to create better, flexible data storage options in the near future.