Tailoring Molecular Magnetism

The invention of the modern computer in the 20th century has significantly changed our way of living and ushered in a new epoch of information technology – the Information age. When Konrad Zuse completed the first programmable, fully automatic and digital computer, the Z3, in Berlin in 1941 [1] it would have been impossible to imagine how computers would become part of our daily lives. Although the computational power of the first computers back then is actually comparable with modern pocket calculators, they were enormous and consumed a lot of power. For example the Z3, which was based on 2000 electromechanical relays, operated at a clock frequency of only 5 − 10 Hz and had a power consumption of 4000W [1]. The first electronic programmable computer, the ENIAC, was presented in the USA in 1946 and used vacuum tubes instead of electromechanical relays. It was one thousand times faster than the electromechanical computers at that time, but it also had a power consumption of 150 kW and needed a space of approximately 170m2 [2]. Nowadays personal computers have typically clock frequencies of about 2−3 GHz, fit easily in a backpack and have a power consumption of only several hundreds of Watts in spite of much larger computational power. These values impressively show the rapid development of the computer technology within the last decades. The corner stone for this rapid development was laid by the American physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley when they built the first transistor in 1947. The transistor rolled up the field of electronics and paved the way to smaller, more powerful, less power consuming and cheaper electronic devices. For their achievement they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. The transistor found its way into computer design already a few years after its invention and replaced vacuum tubes. The first fully transistorized computer was built in the group of Kilburn at Manchester University in 1953 [3]. Ultimately, the invention of the integrated circuit (IC) by Jack Kilby in 1958 led to a breakthrough in the commercial and personal use of computers. The fabrication of ICs by photolithography allowed a huge number of tiny electronic circuits and components, e.g. transistors, to be embedded on a small plate. This offered the possibility of an easy and low cost mass production of personal computers [...