Nanowerk December 18, 2024
The storage medium must be modifiable on the nanoscale. While polymers are promising storage media, they face challenges with synthesis, erasing temperatures, and stability. Researchers in Australia developed a low-cost and robust polymer system that allows repeated writing, reading and erasing. It provided a network of S─S bonds that could be broken and re-formed repeatedly. They leveraged this property to encode information, and thermal S─S metathesis and polymer re-flow to erase. This control enabled data encoding not just as a function of the presence or absence of an indent, but also indentation depth. It increased the data density four-fold over binary coding, the coding could be done at room temperature. According to the researchers these polymers are a promising advance in polymer storage media for probe-based data… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
A) Synthesis of 50-poly(S-r-DCPD) and B) 50-poly(S-r-CPD). Both materials could be drop cast and cured to form a hard, smooth surface. Credit: Advanced Science, 16 December 2024