The researcher have found a new property which can be quite beneficial in field of computing. They found that the new "superatoms" – clusters of atoms that share electrons and can mimic the behaviour of other elements – have been devised with magnetic properties for the first time. The breakthrough provides a way to design novel nano-scale building blocks with controllable magnetic properties that could be used to make faster computer processors and denser memory storage.
Superatoms were discovered in the 1980s when Walter Knight and colleagues found that groups of sodium atoms can share electrons amongst themselves. The electrons form a collective "supershell" that coats the cluster. The supershell behaves much the same way as the outer electrons on regular elements, masking the superatom's true chemical identity. Chemists have since discovered a host of other superatoms – mainly aluminium clusters that react like other elements, such as the noble gases helium or argon.
Such mimicry could help create more efficient fuels, since aluminium powder releases huge amounts of energy when it burns, but reacts with other elements too quickly to be useful as a solid fuel additive. In aluminium clusters that behave chemically like noble gases, however, the metal could hide out until it became activated by the burning of the fuel. Until now, however, clusters that copy the magnetic properties of other elements have proved more difficult to design.
Magnetism is caused by the spin of an atom's electrons, which are arranged in shells, or orbitals, around the atom's nucleus. Their net spin determines the strength of the atom's magnetic "moment", and because they tend to occur in pairs that cancel each other out, it is the atom's unpaired electrons that contribute to its magnetic moment.
Unpaired electrons, however, will make an atom, or a superatom, more likely to react with others in an attempt to fill its orbitals and become stable. As a result, stability and magnetism have long been thought to be mutually exclusive.
The researchers worked out that encapsulating an atom of vanadium in a cage of eight caesium atoms would create a stable supershell of electrons around the entire cluster. This would prevent the vanadium atom's unpaired electrons from reacting with other atoms, maintaining its magnetism. The arrangement would yield a magnetic moment of five Bohr magnetons, which is the same as an atom of manganese.

There's no limit to the number of new magnetic clusters waiting to be discovered, and his team has since designed magnetic superatoms made of vanadium encapsulated in sodium, and manganese in gold.
In each case, the cluster has both a magnetic moment and a filled supershell, making it stable.It could be possible that stable magnetic clusters could one day be used in new "spintronic" devices, which compute or store information using magnetic moments rather than simply electrical charge. Encoding data in this way means the devices can be far smaller than those used to make conventional electronic components, potentially providing an overall boost in computing power.