Infochemistry and infofuses for the chemical storage and transmission of coded information

June 9, 2009
106 (23) 9147-9150
Commentary
Fireworks for the information age
John A. Rogers

Abstract

This article describes a self-powered system that uses chemical reactions—the thermal excitation of alkali metals—to transmit coded alphanumeric information. The transmitter (an “infofuse”) is a strip of the flammable polymer nitrocellulose patterned with alkali metal ions; this pattern encodes the information. The wavelengths of 2 consecutive pulses of light represent each alphanumeric character. While burning, infofuses transmit a sequence of pulses (at 5–20 Hz) of atomic emission that correspond to the sequence of metallic salts (and therefore to the encoded information). This system combines information technology and chemical reactions into a new area—“infochemistry”—that is the first step toward systems that combine sensing and transduction of chemical signals with multicolor transmission of alphanumeric information.

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Acknowledgments.

We thank Dr. Coskun Kocabas for assisting in the design of optics for detection of emission. This work was supported by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Award W911NF-07-1-0647 and by postdoctoral fellowships from the American Cancer Society (S.W.T) and National Institutes of Health/National Institute of General Medical Sciences (C.N.L.).

Supporting Information

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Information & Authors

Information

Published in

The cover image for PNAS Vol.106; No.23
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Vol. 106 | No. 23
June 9, 2009
PubMed: 19470465

Classifications

Submission history

Received: February 5, 2009
Published online: June 9, 2009
Published in issue: June 9, 2009

Keywords

  1. alphanumeric characters
  2. atomic emission
  3. combustion

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Coskun Kocabas for assisting in the design of optics for detection of emission. This work was supported by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Award W911NF-07-1-0647 and by postdoctoral fellowships from the American Cancer Society (S.W.T) and National Institutes of Health/National Institute of General Medical Sciences (C.N.L.).

Notes

See Commentary on page 9127.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0902476106/DCSupplemental.
*
A character set ternary (0,1,2) in the corrected intensity of emission, and that uses an intensity between the currently used “1” and “0” for encoding, would increase the number of possible combinations of emitters in each pulse to 26 (33 − 1), whereas the upper and lower thresholds for the intermediate intensity could be at the maximal errors (≈20%, ≈80%) observed in Fig. 4B.

Authors

Affiliations

Samuel W. Thomas, III
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138;
Ryan C. Chiechi
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138;
Christopher N. LaFratta
Department of Chemistry, Tufts University, 62 Talbot Avenue, Medford, MA 02155; and
Michael R. Webb
Department of Chemistry, Tufts University, 62 Talbot Avenue, Medford, MA 02155; and
Andrew Lee
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138;
Benjamin J. Wiley
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138;
Mitchell R. Zakin
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 3701 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA 22203
David R. Walt
Department of Chemistry, Tufts University, 62 Talbot Avenue, Medford, MA 02155; and
George M. Whitesides1 [email protected]
Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138;

Notes

1
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected]
Contributed by George M. Whitesides, March 10, 2009
Author contributions: S.W.T., R.C.C., C.N.L., M.R.W., A.L., B.J.W., M.R.Z., D.R.W., and G.M.W. designed research; S.W.T., R.C.C., C.N.L., M.R.W., A.L., and B.J.W. performed research; S.W.T., R.C.C., C.N.L., and M.R.W. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; S.W.T., R.C.C., C.N.L., and M.R.W. analyzed data; and S.W.T., R.C.C., and G.M.W. wrote the paper.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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    Infochemistry and infofuses for the chemical storage and transmission of coded information
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
    • Vol. 106
    • No. 23
    • pp. 9123-9535

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