Fluorescent Silver

humtibum writes: "Sciencedaily has an article on Nanoclusters of 2-8 Silver Atoms that may be the basis for new optical storage techniques: read it here."

Silver, Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can just imagine it: a hundred years from now, when we do away with physical money, we still will be conducting our transactions with gold and silver: gold electrical contacts and silver-based storage devices.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

You miss one Friday...

[psicic]

Typical, I don't log on to Slashdot for one day and this passes by with little or no comment by the Slashdot community.
I mean, this seems like pretty revolutionary stuff to me. Is no one else intrigued by the possiblities this presents. To quote:
"By using the correct distribution of particle sizes, these multi-color emissions could allow storage of more than one bit of information in each data point..."
Does this not strike anyone as a boon?
What about:
"...[it could be used] for writing and reading in parallel [in a binary system]..."
Surely this development opens up a whole new field for electronic components? Surely it opens up new vistas for computing? Maybe I'm missing something here, but I am blown away.
Would cost of materials or cost of manufacturing be prohibitive, I wonder. Or would the system be necessarialy fragile in real world systems?

I wonder, however, if one of you Chemi-geeks out there might answer a naive Compu-geek's question: are silver oxide(Ag2O) nanoparticles unique in this respect - i.e. with regards to the ability to 'program' the ability to fluoresce with blue laser light.
8)

Re: Excited

[calcfreak901]

Diamond maybe, but titanium bends too easily. I've had titanium wires in my braces before, and titanium bends MUCH more easily than stainless steel, at least as bare thirtysomething-guage wire.

Re:Excited

[GeekOfSpades]

Wow. I'm sure James Bond (or a seductive counterpart) could make good use of this...

"The plans are on her piercing where?!?!"

Other uses

[ooze]

Maybe this can be used to build some processing devices entirely in optical technology for glass fiber switches, as this seems to be a problem today.

Ag2O

[11thangel]

According to the article, the film that they were actually writing to was not plain silver, but Ag2O, silver oxide.

Excited

[bluelip]

It seems that much of the technology news lately has been about engineers/chemists/etc working with nearly a single atom. How far off does everyone think we'll have a storage device where we can store 1 bit per atom. I'm assuming that this material would have to very pure. Will we ever be able to use any substance? This would be a perfect use for all of those pizza crusts laying around. Just pop'em into Mr. Storage and instantly you have 500 extra Tb laying for the prOn collection.

At least...

[TWX_the_Linux_Zealot]

"According to the article, the film that they were actually writing to was not plain silver, but Ag2O, silver oxide."

at least it won't tarnish...

"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."