The element silver could hold the key to future generations of data storage products. By manipulating silver clusters with fluorescent properties, chemists have found they can produce light emissions that may be used to hold and transmit digital data.

Chemists from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US describe in the journal Science how they created silver clusters a few atoms wide and excited them with light of different wavelengths. They discovered that, in this way, they could generate characteristic fluorescent emissions.

Exciting the particles with green light led to red fluorescence; using blue light produced red, yellow and green.

The researchers suggest that data could be written to these particles with one kind of light and non-destructively "read" by applying another light to generate fluorescence. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, United States, tel: +1 404 894 4007; e-mail: dickson@chemistry.gatech.edu

Copyright: The Financial Times Limited

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