Scientists have known about skyrmions since the 1960s, but a recent discovery has allowed them to create and destroy them at will. The technique involves using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and a polarized current to force groups of atoms into knot-like twisted configurations. The skyrmions resist unraveling, and so they can be theoretically used to store zeros (untwisted) or ones (twisted), the key to storing data digitally.
Kristen von Bergmann, a physicist at the University of Hamburg, says that skyrmonic hard disks could hold 20 times more data per unit area than current hard disks, as each skyrmion is only a few nanometers in diameter. This means that instead of having a hard drive with 4 TB of space, in the future a skyrmonic drive of the same size could hold 80 TB.
