Smallest magnetic memory bit

In January 2012, IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science announced they had managed to store one bit of data on a storage device consisting of just 12 atoms of iron, measuring 4 x 16 nanometres. By comparison an average modern PC requires around one million atoms to do the same. IBM’s experimental design was created atom by atom using a scanning tunnelling microscope at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.