A drop in the data ocean (Image: Russ Widstrand/Getty Images)

Don’t drink that, it’s my hard drive! A future form of computing could see information stored on clusters of microscopic particles suspended in liquid.

Clusters of spheres can arrange themselves around a central sphere in a limited number of ways, similar to how a Rubik’s cube can only be twisted in certain ways around the central point. Sharon Glotzer at the University of Michigan and her team realised these states could represent information.

To test the idea, the team created a cluster of five spheres in a liquid and watched them naturally switch between two states, like the 0s and 1s of traditional computing bits. “It’s really just the first baby steps,” says Glotzer. Next, they plan to create clusters that can be locked into a particular state to store a bit of data, and unlocked again to rewrite it, using a central sphere made from gel that can swell and shrink.


In theory, a terabyte of data could be stored in a tablespoon of clusters – though it might be hard to scale up. Klaus-Peter Zauner at the University of Southampton, UK, notes that there is no obvious way to read and write data to large numbers of clusters floating in a liquid. Instead, he suggests that individual clusters could be used to guide self-assembling materials on a microscopic scale.

Journal reference: Soft Matter, DOI: 10.1039/C4SM00796D