Uranium Single-Molecule Magnet...

[GAMerritt]

Potential new disk storage technology ? A report from the University of Nottingham for you: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2011/april/breakthroughdatastorage.aspx[^] Comments, anyone?

[M dHatter]

until you shake it ... ;)

"I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones." Einstein "Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example." Mark Twain

[OriginalGriff]

Oooo! Data that glows in the dark! :-D

Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together. Manfred R. Bihy: "Looks as if OP is learning resistant."

[Mark_Wallace]

It's great, if you don't mind sitting in the freezer to work on your computer.

I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!

[DoStuffZ]

Or the cooling device malfuncts and your data are met by their half-lives.

[GAMerritt]

Trying to achieve high data density, the molecules would have to be brought close together, and not knowing the radiation spectra or amplitudes, you can't compare the distance with the useful minima we've seen for ferromagnetic storage. And one mol may bit-store reliably in isolation, but this says nothing about what happens in a close-packed matrix of such mols. I haven't read the text of the article this report refers to. If anybody knows where a copy can be found, gratis, please leave a link so I can look at it. Another thing is the decay chains and the idea of what happens to a matrix of these mols when decay occurs. Imagining a one-bit-per-mol data storage scheme leads to thinking of losing one bit of data with every decay. And one-bit-per-X-mols packed into an artificially created domain where all X mols store the same magnetization brings up the question of intra-domain thermal transfers, which although not scary for single-bit storage, might be a threat over a few billion such domains because they would have to produce radiation extending beyond the domain boundaries. I can imagine a problem there with isolating them from your microprocessors and other chips, which will quit working right if they're subjected to ion bombardment. I don't think the U of N would have suggested a data storage use for these mols, though, if something as obvious as that would preclude it; and I don't know enough about it to guess whether the emissive effects of U in this context would be different than in the pure state as we see it in fissionable material. Anybody know about this aspect of it?