Carbon pods are more than a pack of peas. (Materials Science).In a step toward a postsilicon age of microelectronics, researchers have found that they can manipulate the electronic character of nanoscopic carbon structures. The researchers worked with hollow, 1-nanometer-wide carbon nanotubes, which they stuffed pea pod style with buckyballs--soccer ball--shape molecules of 60 carbon atoms. The buckyball-filled nanotubes were first created in 1998 by David E. Luzzi of the University of Pennsylvania (body, education) University of Pennsylvania - The home of ENIAC and Machiavelli. http://upenn.edu/. Address: Philadelphia, PA, USA. in Philadelphia and his colleagues. In the Feb. 1 Science, a team including Luzzi, his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, and researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Early years: 1867-1880 The Morrill Act of 1862 granted each state in the United States a portion of land on which to establish a major public state university, one which could teach agriculture, mechanic arts, and military training, "without excluding other scientific reports that the molecular peas change the electronic properties of their carbon pods. The scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope scanning tunneling microscope, device for studying and imaging individual atoms on the surfaces of materials. The instrument was invented in the early 1980s by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, who were awarded the 1986 Nobel prize in physics for their work. (STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscope) A microscope that can image down to the atomic level. An STM uses a piezoelectric tube with a tiny sharp tip at the end that is moved within nanometers of the object being sampled. ) to image the pea pods' structures and to map the motion of electrons in them. They found that the electronic features along each nanotube A carbon molecule that resembles a cylinder made out of chicken wire one to two nanometers in diameter by any number of millimeters in length. Accidentally discovered by a Japanese researcher at NEC in 1990 while making Buckyballs, they have potential use in many applications. varied with the positions of the buckyballs. The researchers also found that they could use the STM to move the buckyballs around inside the tubes, says coauthor Ali Yazdani of the University of Illinois University of Illinois may refer to:
Many scientists are looking to carbon nanotubes and similar nanosize structures as potential successors to silicon. Means to control how electrons move and distribute themselves along nanotubes, which this research could lead to, could hasten that succession, says Yazdani. --J.G. |
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