Lithography for robust and editable atomic-scale silicon devices and memories

At the atomic scale, there has always been a trade-off between the ease of fabrication of structures and their thermal stability. Complex structures that are created effortlessly often disorder above cryogenic conditions. Conversely, systems with high thermal stability do not generally permit the same degree of complex manipulations. Here, we report scanning tunneling microscope (STM) techniques to substantially improve automated hydrogen lithography (HL) on silicon, and to transform state-of-the-art hydrogen repassivation into an efficient, accessible error correction/editing tool relative to existing chemical and mechanical methods. These techniques are readily adapted to many STMs, together enabling fabrication of error-free, room-temperature stable structures of unprecedented size. We created two rewriteable atomic memories (1.1 petabits per in²), storing the alphabet letter-by-letter in 8 bits and a piece of music in 192 bits. With HL no longer faced with this trade-off, practical silicon-based atomic-scale devices are poised to make rapid advances towards their full potential.