Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
h a l f b a k e r y
This ain't rocket surgery.

idea: add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, random

meta: news, help, about, links, report a problem

account: browse anonymously, or get an account and write.

register, login


               

Plastic magnets

Trap flux quanta in pi orbitals of aromatic compounds
  (+5)
(+5)
 

A superconductor has a set of electrons that go to a super electron wave state. The wave functions of the individual electrons overlap so it becomes impossible to distinguish one electron from another. If you have a loop of superconducting material with a 2 pi phase change as you go around the circuit, the loop will trap one quantum of magnetic flux with an endlessly circulating current. You have to break the circuit and the super electron wave function to get magnetic flux in or out.

Aromatic organic compounds have loops of (4N + 2) carbon-carbon bonds. These are often drawn as alternate single and double bonds, but what you actually have is a single sigma bond and cloud of overlapping pi electron wave functions in a common energy state. Sounds a bit like a superconducting loop, doesn't it?

The simplest aromatic compound is benzine. In theory, you could link a flux quantum into a benzine molecule, but you would need a big magnetic field (2 Tesla?) and some way of busting up the pi orbitals so the flux can get in.

Porphyrins are square molecules with an 18-element aromatic ring. This has five or six times the area of benzine, so the magnetic field would go down in proportion. You can trap a metallic atom in the centre of the ring: something like cobalt or iron might stabilise the magnetic field.

How do you get the magnetic field in? If you heat up the porphyrin molecule in a strong magnetic field, the vibrations can bend the molecule out of being flat, which breaks the pi delocalisation, and lets the flux quantum slip in. You will then have a mixture of the ordinary porphyrin and the first magnetic isomer. The magnetic molecules may stack and crystallise out.

Another thing you could do is to stick chemical groups at the porphyrin corners, so the squares might self-assemble into tapes. You now have molecular-sized magnetic tape where each square has three possible states.

A mole of bits is a lot of memory.

—Richard K, Aug 17 2026

Only vaguely related ... A_20staple_20form_20of_20memory
[normzone, Aug 17 2026]

Metalloporphyrins in quantum computing https://advanced.on...1002/adom.202303036
[xaviergisz, Aug 19 2026]





       {boggling} [+]
—pertinax, Aug 18 2026
  

       Does it work at room temperature?
—bhumphrys, Aug 18 2026
  

       //A mole of bits is a lot of memory.//   

       and at current prices, a lot of money.
—bs0u0155, Aug 18 2026
  

       This ought to work at room temperature up to about 200C. The single benzine ring might be even more robust if you could get the flux in.   

       The memory elements would be chemically prepared rather than produced individually via lithography, so they should be really cheap. The tricky bit will be to form them into tapes so they can be read and written. A lot of large-scale database archives still use tape, as data densities and writing speeds continue to climb.
—Richard K, Aug 20 2026
  

       See Metalloporphyrins in quantum computing link.   

       My original suggestion came up when I worked for Canon in the late nineties. It was not suggested here at the time, as I had hopes they might try it.   

       Well, well, well - someone's baked it.
—Richard K, Aug 20 2026
  
         


 

back: main index

business  computer  culture  fashion  food  halfbakery  home  other  product  public  science  sport  vehicle