Single Atom Memory: Mostly classical, sometimes quantum
Dr. Fabian Natterer is professor of Quantum Matter at UZH. His group works on understanding the properties of matter at the atomic scale and using that knowledge to build artificial quantum matter, one atom at a time.

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"You can't have the cake and eat it too" is the sad reality we are facing too many times. We are creatures of a classical world, subject to Newtonian mechanics. How would our life look like if we had it both ways? Here we explore this analogy in the realms of magnetic data storage in which the classical dogma states that the smaller the size of a magnetic bit, the more difficult and seemingly impossible it will be to write that bit. We will show how a classical single atom magnet can be turned into a quantum bit at which point the rules formulated for a classical world cease to exist.