This is an organic fiber derived from photocopying technology that
self assembles and has excellent electrical properties. It may be
competitive with the oncoming nanotube technologies.
This is almost invisible to the public but our capacity to manipulate
at the near molecular level has advanced rapidly and broadly and is
still barely begun.
My own objective is to see superconducting skins and refrigerating
skins for the fabrication of a magnetic field exclusion vessel.
These can also be used for more mundane things such as an efficient
cheap Eden Machine.
It appears that current can be also sent from one plate to another
device in a managed and segmented manner. This is surely important
somehow.
Self-assembling
plastic nanofibers present cheaper alternative to carbon nanotubes
By Antonio
Pasolini
22:20 April 23, 2012
French researchers
have produced highly conducive plastic fibers with a thickness of
only a few nanometers that self-assemble when exposed to a flash of
light. The tiny fibers (one nanometer equals one billionth of a
meter) could become a cheaper and easier-to-handle alternative to
carbon nanotubes and play a role in the development of electronic
components on the nanoscale.
Researchers from the
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), an organization
funded by the French government, and the Université de Strasbourg
say the fibers combine the properties of metals and plastic organic
polymers, which are commonly used to conduct electric current, and
see applications in several fields ranging from electronics to
architecture.
Lead researchers
Nicolas Giuseppone and Bernard Doudin now want to demonstrate that
the plastic fibers have the potential to be integrated into products
such as flexible screens and solar cells.
Back in 2010,
Giuseppone and Doudin succeeded in obtaining nanowires by chemically
modifying “triarylamines,” which are synthetic molecules that
Xerox used for decades in its photocopying processes. They
observed that in light and in solution the new molecules formed
miniature fibers by stacking up spontaneously in a regular manner.
In the latest research
the molecules were placed in contact with an electronic microcircuit
comprising gold electrodes spaced 100 nm apart then applied an
electric field between these electrodes. Not only were the fibers
were found to self-assemble between the electrodes when triggered by
a flash of light, but they are also able to transport current
densities approaching that of copper wire. These light and flexible
"supramolecular” structures also have very low interface
resistance with metals, or 10,000 times below that of the best
organic polymers.
“It is difficult to
know if the current technologies can incorporate them readily or if
we need to change the surrounding devices to adapt these new
structures,” Giuseppone told Gizmag. “We are currently trying an
insertion in current technologies to improve them, but maybe these
fibers are sufficiently novel to enable new technologies. This would
be, in fact, the most interesting for us.”
Giuseppone points out
that the race to miniaturize electronic components on the nano scale
requires “extremely efficient active components with, for instance,
very low interface resistance between the components of the
electronic circuits."
"Our fibers show
such behavior,” he adds.
50 nm in high image
showing the nonowires developed by CNRS. Each grain corresponds to a
molecule (Photo: © M. Maaloum, ICS (CNRS))
Another advantage of
the self-constructing attributes of the fibers is that they enable
the adoption of a "bottom-up" manufacturing approach,
potentially making processing easier, faster and cheaper.
“Manipulating objects at the nanoscale is very difficult and
expensive by a top-down approach,” says Giuseppone.
The work was published
this month in the journal Nature Chemistry
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