Innovation in electronics manufacturing is driven by a desire to make devices ever smaller but increasingly powerful. Moore's Law has seen the power of computer chips double every two years without them growing in size, while data storage plateaued somewhat.

But in a breakthrough that could revolutionise the way information is stored, researchers have managed to store data on a single atom.

Researchers at IBM successfully coded an individual atom with a binary value of 0 or 1 in what is a major step forward for information storage. Experts in the field have described the research as a "landmark achievement" and said it could be used to increase hard-drive storage density by 1,000 times.

"It's a landmark achievement," Sander Otte, a physicist at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, told Nature. "Finally, magnetic stability has been demonstrated undeniably in a single atom."