Researchers hail advance in programmable synthetic materials

Researchers in the US and Germany have taken a step towards the vision of developing programmable synthetic materials that could form the basis of a new type of computer.

Artificial molecules - in which information is encoded in the spatial arrangement of the individual atoms - are thought to hold promise for a new generation of for programmable substances, but until now researchers have struggled to find a way to accurately read these encoded arrangements.

Writing in the journal Science, a group made up of researchers from the  University of California, Berkeley, and Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) in Germany showed that atom probe tomography (APT) can be used to read a complex spatial arrangement of metal ions in multivariate metal-organic frameworks.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are crystalline porous networks of multi-metal nodes linked together by organic units to form a well-defined structure. To encode information using a sequence of metals, it is essential to be first able to read the metal arrangement.