Researchers use world's smallest diamonds to make wires three atoms wide (Update)

This animation shows molecular building blocks change of integrity the tip of a growing nanowire.

every block consists of a diamondoid -- the littlest doable little bit of diamond -- connected to sulfur and copper atoms (yellow and brown spheres). Like plaything blocks, they solely work along insure ways in which are determined by their size and form. The copper and sulfur atoms kind a semiconductive wire within the middle, and therefore the diamondoids kind associate degree insulating outer shell. Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Scientists at university and therefore the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered how to use diamondoids - the littlest doable bits of diamond - to assemble atoms into the thinnest double electrical wires, simply 3 atoms wide.

By grabbing varied kinds of atoms and swing them along LEGO-style, the new technique may probably be want to build small wires for a good vary of applications, together with materials that generate electricity, optoelectronic devices that use each electricity and lightweight, and superconducting materials that conduct electricity with none loss. The scientists rumored their results
nowadays in Nature Materials.

"What we've got shown here is that we are able to create small, semiconducting wires of the littlest attainable size that primarily assemble themselves," aforementioned Vietnamese monetary unit Yan, a Stanford postdoctoral scientist and lead author of the paper. "The method may be an easy, one-pot synthesis. You dump the ingredients along associated you'll get ends up in [*fr1] an hour. It's virtual as if the diamondoids grasp wherever they need to travel."

The Smaller the higher
Although there ar different ways in which to induce materials to self-assemble, this is often the primary one shown to create a nanowire with a solid, crystalline core that has smart electronic properties, aforementioned study author Saint Nicholas Melosh, associate professor at SLAC and Stanford and investigator with SIMES, the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences at SLAC.

The needle-like wires have a conductive core - a mixture of copper and sulfur called a chalcogenide - encircled by the connected diamondoids, that type associated insulating shell.




Fuzzy white clusters of nanowires on a bench, with a penny for scale. Assembled with the assistance of diamondoids, the microscopic nanowires will be seen with the optic as a result of the sturdy mutual attraction between their diamondoid shells makes them clump along, during this case by the millions. At high right, a picture created with a scanning microscope shows nanowire clusters enlarged ten,000 times. Credit: SEM image by Vietnamese monetary unit Yan/SIMES; picture by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Their minuscule size is very important, Melosh same, as a result of a cloth that exists in precisely one or 2 dimensions - as atomic-scale dots, wires or sheets - will have terribly completely different, extraordinary properties compared to an equivalent material created in bulk. The new technique permits researchers to assemble those materials with atom-by-atom exactness and management.

The diamondoids they used as assembly tools square measure little, interlocking cages of carbon and H. Found naturally in crude fluids, they're extracted and separated by size and pure mathematics in an exceedingly SLAC laboratory. Over the past decade, a SIMES analysis program LED by Melosh and SLAC/Stanford faculty member Zhi-Xun Shen has found a variety of potential uses for the tiny diamonds, as well as up microscope pictures and creating little electronic gadgets.