Infochemistry and infofuses for the chemical storage and transmission of coded information
Commentary
June 9, 2009
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.
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.).
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© 2009.
Submission history
Received: February 5, 2009
Published online: June 9, 2009
Published in issue: June 9, 2009
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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.).
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.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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Infochemistry and infofuses for the chemical storage and transmission of coded information, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
106 (23) 9147-9150,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0902476106
(2009).
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