Tiny Möbius strip fashioned from carbon nanotube building blocks

Now we have all the time been in a position to make Möbius strips out of paper, however now it’s doable to make tiny variations of those uncommon geometric objects utilizing the molecular constructing blocks of a carbon nanotube

By Alex Wilkins

A brief part of carbon nanotube constructed from scratch varieties a tiny Möbius strip – a one-sided floor that outcomes from a band with a twist in it.

You’ll think about you possibly can simply salami slice a carbon nanotube to get a band. However the tubes are troublesome to control as a result of they’re so small. They will’t be minimize into cylindrical bands – which chemists name carbon nanobelts – as a tube of paper could be because of the highly effective intramolecular forces at nanometre scales.

There may be, nevertheless, one method to make a carbon nanobelt. In 2017, Yasutomo Segawa on the Institute for Molecular Science in Okazaki, Japan, and his colleagues confirmed they may very well be assembled piece-by-piece from a set of smaller molecular items by a sequence of chemical reactions.

Now, Segawa and his crew have gone one step additional and created a Möbius strip-shaped carbon nanobelt. To construct it, they modified the chemical course of for constructing their carbon nanobelts – as a substitute of utilizing a good variety of repeat items to type the belt, they used an odd quantity.

“The final word purpose of natural chemistry is to create all doable molecular constructions,” says Segawa. “Our achievement is one nice step towards that objective.”

After that they had carried out the modified chemical reactions, Segawa and his crew confirmed the ensuing construction actually was a Möbius strip utilizing high-resolution spectroscopy.

Whereas an instantaneous use for the carbon Möbius strip may not be obvious, the finesse required to create it may lend itself to different challenges in nanoengineering and chemistry, says Nicole Grobert on the College of Oxford.

“The exact software for this Möbius band might not be an apparent one, even for the researchers who’ve researched it, but when they’ll lengthen their magic chemistry to bigger methods and obtain final management of bigger carbon methods, then you can begin to consider upscaling and scaling to moist chemistry methods,” says Grobert.

Journal reference: Nature Synthesis, DOI: 10.1038/s44160-022-00075-8