[Am-info] Follow The Bouncing Ball To Storage

[Fred A. Miller]

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Follow The Bouncing Ball To Storage

Russian scientists say they may have created the next big thing 
in computer memory: flexible, transparent sheets of carbon, the 
first pure nonmetallic magnets to work at room temperature. The 
material could lead to cheap, durable, extremely high-density 
storage.

Physicist Tatiana Makarova says she created the stuff in a 
fortuitous accident while trying to produce new high-
temperature superconductors. She was experimenting with 
buckyballs--exotic, soccer-ball-shaped spheres of carbon 
atoms--trying to force them to join in a sheet by superheating 
and pressurizing them. The resulting material didn't 
superconduct but was magnetic at room temperature up through 
200 degrees Celsius. The highest temperature anyone had ever 
gotten a nonmetallic magnet to work before was at a frigid -255 
Celsius.

Room-temperature organic magnets are much lighter and more 
flexible than metallic magnets, making them ideal for use in 
electronic devices. They also have semiconducting and 
insulating properties, making them potentially useful in 
chipbuilding. What's more, Makarova and her team from the Ioffe 
Physico-Technical Institute in St. Petersburg have found that 
the material is photoresponsive, changing its magnetic 
properties when a light is shined on it. That could make it 
useful in optical storage.

"It's very interesting research," says Laszlo Mihaly, a 
professor of physics at the State University of New York at 
Stony Brook, and who studies buckyballs. "Some of the bonds 
within the balls are broken up and linked between the balls, 
and this makes it kind of a network, and a weak magnet." Mihaly 
says buckyballs could prove important in developing other new 
materials, including superconducting transistors. "It's an 
integrated circuit that's flexible, cheap, and can be mass 
produced." - David M. Ewalt 

Read more about superconductors:
Superconductors More Important With 3G Wireless?
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eFp40Bce7K0V20bMb0Ak

Superconductor Search Heats Up
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eFp40Bce7K0V20BVzt0Ah

- -- 
Fred A. Miller
Systems Administrator
Cornell Univ. Press Services
fm@cupserv.org

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