Researchers Create a Single-Molecule Switch
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Researchers create a single-molecule switch:
A team of researchers has demonstrated for the first time a single-molecule electret-a device that could be one of the keys to molecular computers.
Smaller electronics are crucial to developing more advanced computers and other devices. This has led to a push in the field toward finding a way to replace silicon chips with molecules, an effort that includes creating single-molecule electret-a switching device that could serve as a platform for extremely small non-volatile storage devices. Because it seemed that such a device would be so unstable, however, many in the field wondered whether one could ever exist.
Along with colleagues at Nanjing University, Renmin University, Xiamen University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Mark Reed, the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Electrical Engineering & Applied Physics demonstrated a single-molecule electret with a functional memory. The results were published Oct. 12 in Nature Nanotechnology.
[...] Reed emphasized that the present device structure isn't currently practical for any application, but proves that the underlying science behind it is possible.
"The important thing in this is that it shows you can create in a molecule two states that cause the spontaneous polarization and two switchable states," he said. "And this can give people ideas that maybe you can shrink memory down literally to the single molecular level. Now that we understand that we can do that, we can move on to do more interesting things with it."
Journal Reference:
Kangkang Zhang, Cong Wang, Minhao Zhang, et al. A Gd@C 82 single-molecule electret, Nature Nanotechnology (DOI: 10.1038/s41565-020-00778-z)
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