Knotted Carbon Nanotubes

Submarine writes: "Researchers from the CRPP ( University Bordeaux 1 (France) / CNRS) have produced knotted nanotubes. See a short description of their work, complete with images."

Re:Nano? Micro.

[renoX]

You misread, the diameter is on the order of a nanometer not micrometer.

Re:Nano? Micro.

[Submarine]

From the article itself: [...] aggregates the nanotubes into narrow strips. These strips, a few microns thick and a few millimeters wide, are made up of entangled nanotubes with a preferred orientation due to the direction of extrusion, as shown under the optical microscope (Figure 1) and the electron microscope. These strips contract when dried in air and the water they contain is evacuated by capillary action, forming dense fibers (Figure 2). This means that the knotted fibers shown as optical shots are actually kind of bundles of nanotubes. The salient point of those knots is that normal carbon fibers cannot be twisted nor knotted, while these can, to some extent.

Nano? Micro.

[jovlinger]

I dunno. I thought nanotubes would be... smaller.
The knotted tubes are 10 microns in diameter, and are shown using an optical microscope.

Given that intel is mass producing microchips with features 1/75th this size, I had thought the state of the art would be smaller than that.

I'm obviously missing somehting.

Nanotube Uses?

[voidzero]

They could be/are being used as nanowires, nanocapsulates, paper thin displays, transistors etc... they have excellent thermal conductivity, ..., and most importantly, depending on the details of their atomic arrangement, they behave as metals or semiconductors." [worldlink.co.uk]

More links:
NASA Nanotechnology Team [nasa.gov]
Nanotechnology with Carbon Nanotubes [about.com]

Also do a search on /. for nanotube.

The geese do not wish to leave their reflection behind;
The water has no mind to retain their image.

computers

[milgram]

How could this be used for computers?

Re:Nano? Micro.

[grammar nazi]

The article defines nanotubes to be "...These cylinders can be a few microns or even millimeters long, with a diameter of the order of a nanometer..."

What gives? How is a 10 um diameter tube a nanotube? Maybe I misread something. Please clarify! I've seen carbon fibers that were on the order of 10 um across.

Re:Nano? Micro.

[banks]

What you're missing is that these pictures aren't of single nanotubes, but rather of strips or strands consisting of numerous nanotubes, and they're not intended as microprocessor components at all. Nanotubes have potential applications all over, not just in microelectronics.

These macroscopic fibers allow macro-scale experimentation on the properties of nano-tubes. While they are too large to serve as, say, interconnects on microchips, they have a host of other uses. While much is hypothesized about the properties of nanotubes, not much is known concretely. Hopefully, these will allow experiments to determine the actual physical properties of the tubes.

The article also mentions using the nanotube fibers as a substite for existing carbon fiber components, which would allow these to become even lighter and stronger, and at first glance would seem to solve the problems some of these materials have with brittleness and low tolerances for linear stresses.

They just gave some to the girl at the bar...

[human bean]

and she did it the same way she does marischino cherry stems. 8)

I want to see how she unties them.