The ultimate size limit of magnetic bits is a single atom. We report on adsorbate substrate combinations that we discovered recently where indeed single atoms are stable magnets. We show how their magnetization can be read and written and we elaborate on the mechanisms that limit their stability. Our results show that single atom magnetic information storage is feasible. We discuss the features that need to be met for single atom magnetic quantum bits, i.e., for single atoms that enable coherent manipulation of the wave function describing their magnetic quantum state.

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Bio

Harald Brune is Full Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He studied Physics at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and made his PhD in 1992 in Physical Chemistry with Gerhard Ertl and Jürgen Behm at the Fritz-Haber Institute of the Max-Planck Society in Berlin. He has joined the group of Klaus Kern as Post Doctoral Fellow at EPFL, where he was nominated Lecturer in 1996, Associate Professor in 1999, and Full Professor in 2003. He is Fellow of the American and European Physical Society, Hans-Fischer Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at Technical University of Munich, Max-Planck Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, has been President of the Natural and Engineering Science Division of the Swiss National Science Foundation and heads since 2017 the Institute of Physics at EPFL.