Skip to main content
   World's strongest material acts like a tiny transistor
carbyne
Image: Vasilii Artyukhov/Rice University
Graphene is a pure carbon material that’s just one atom thick. It’s 100 times stronger than steel, incredibly light, and it’s super-efficient at conducting heat and electricity. It’s a true wonder-material, but now there’s a new wonder-material in town: carbyne.
While graphene is made up of a two-dimensional layer of atoms, carbyne is made up of a single chain of carbon atoms, and according to Sarah Zhang at Gizmodo, by a recent measure, it's the new strongest material in the world.
Researchers at Rice University in the US have been investigating the potential of carbyne, and through computer modelling discovered that if they stretched this material by just 3 percent, it becomes an insulator instead of a conductor. This switch between insulating and conducting is exactly what transistors do, and transistors are the essential building blocks of modern electronics. This means carbyne could be used to make minuscule transistors to fit into new nanoscale electronics for use in medicine or to develop new energy solutions.
"But before we get too ahead of ourselves, it is important to note that carbyne is very difficult to make,” cautions Zhang at Gizmodo. "Graphene, on the other hand, is something you can make with Scotch tape. Carbyne is sometimes found in compressed graphite, but scientists have only been able to synthesise it in chains 44 atoms long so far. The new study of carbyne’s properties is based on computer models rather than physical chains - nevertheless, the results are cool enough to be worth pondering."
The researchers published their findings in the journal Nano Letters.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a  tattooed ,  deep-voiced  man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called  vivianite  (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are  from him resting  near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allowing groundwater to come inside the
Post a Comment
Read more

It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Peer-review has spoken. Earlier this year , physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy. Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals  back in January,  and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality. "We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory,"  says one of the researchers , Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin. "Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come." Time crystals  are one of the coolest things physics has dished up in recent months, because they point to a
Post a Comment
Read more

The Dark Side Of The Love Hormone Oxytocin

New research shows oxytocin isn't the anti-anxiety drug we thought it was. Oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone released by physical contact with another person, orgasm and childbirth (potentially encouraging  monogamy ), might have a darker side. The  love drug  also plays an important role in intensifying  negative emotional memories  and increasing feelings of fear in future stressful situations, according to a new study. Two experiments performed with mice found that the hormone activates a signaling molecule called extracellular-signal-related kinases (ERK), which has been associated with the way the brain  forms memories   of fear . According to Jelena Radulovic, senior author on the study and a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, ERK stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum, the region with the highest levels of oxytocin. Mice without oxytocin receptors and mice with even more oxytocin receptors than usual were placed in
Post a Comment
Read more