its real name is really rather long I've
got old day sh get it on the screen so
we can read it out cu there there a
chemdraw picture of it and I could read
it out and it's formal name is bisbis n
trith Camino dile phosphono methanide
uranium iodo toine diod so that is this
compound right
here so my colleague Steve little the
uranium man has just published a
paper and he's made a new compound with
two uranium atoms in it quite
complicated but it has one interesting
property and I want to tell you about
that this one is the the main subject of
the paper which we've just published
it's a really really intense dark blue
color it's so blue that actually when
you look at it you think it's black
to begin with you have to think about
the hard dis in your computer or if
you've got an oldfashioned iPod inside
there as well which uses magnetic
material to record the norts and ones
that make up digital signals for your
music or your computer programs or
whatever and it does this by having
small regions that are
magnetic and they behave just like a
little magnet with a North and a South
Pole and they can point one way for a n
and the other way for a
one and the smaller you can make this
region the more information you can get
on a hard disk and over the
years material scientists and chemists
have managed to make materials that get
smaller and smaller magnetic areas that
can still be read this is what we would
call a single molecule
magnet and what this single molecule
magnet uh title means is that it has a
type of magnetism which is held
preferentially uh at a particular
temperature and it will hold that
magnetism but if it gets too warm then
it scrambles and it loses its preference
a few years ago people came up with
something they called single molecule
magnets which contained a relatively
small number of atom metal atoms which
were lined up and once these atoms had
been
magnetized if they were at low
temperature they could keep their
magnetization it was very cold only a
few degrees above um absolute zero but
enough to demonstrate the effect so if
you can get individual molecules to
store your individual zeros and ones
you've increased the level of data
storage
many hundreds of times probably
thousands of times the problem is
finding a single molecule magnet that
keeps its magnetization really
well and the transition metals iron
particularly manganese are very good
with one property but they have a
different property which is not so good
for getting the effect on the other hand
the lanthanide elements the rare Earths
have
the second property very good the first
one isn't so good and it looks as if the
uranium group The actinides has the two
properties together both reasonably good
neither's brilliant but the combination
is better than either the transition
metals or the rare Earths so it could
actually be one of the best elements
available to do this and Steve has now
demonstrated the principle that you can
get uranium atoms which will couple
together in the way that you need for a
single molecule magnet the effect is
really quite
striking the problem is that it only
curves at a really low
temperature so the temperature that it
works at is below 2 degre absolute which
is absolutely hopeless if you wanted to
make a hard
dis but it's a first step are you
suggesting that we could have hard
drives containing uranium in the future
I'm saying in the future it might be
possible whether anybody actually wants
a hard drive with depleted uranium in it
is an entirely separate issue but from a
does it work yes or no perspective the
answer is in the future yes it might be
able to work I think it's pretty
unlikely that you will have uranium in
computers but what I do think is that
compounds like this again make chemists
think and suddenly they'll realize well
we could do something quite clever and
get round the fact that we don't need to
use uranium so this is our molecule here
and you can see a uranium there and a
uranium Center there and then we've got
these quite big complicated lians but
basically the uranium is bonded to one
carbon and two nitrogens and then it has
an iodide and then we've got this
bridging toine molecule and then on this
side it's exactly the same as that side
what's a that's a monster molecule that
is a a monster molecule
indeed