How To Cut a Nanotube? Lots Of Compression

An anonymous reader writes "A pipefitter knows how to make an exact cut on a metal rod. But it's far harder to imagine getting a precise cut on a carbon nanotube, with a diameter 1/50,000th the thickness of a human hair. In a paper published this month in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, researchers at Brown University and in Korea document for the first time how single-walled carbon nanotubes are cut, a finding that could lead to producing more precise, higher-quality nanotubes. Such manufacturing improvements likely would make the nanotubes more attractive for use in automotive, biomedicine, electronics, energy, optics and many other fields."

If you don't want to surf redirects

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Here's the Brown/KIST researchers' video, a rendered simulation showing the buckling action http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzNqW_d0QGc&fmt=18 [youtube.com]

This is a mildly related movie of actual electron microscopy of a flat graphene sheet finding its most stable configuration after a hole was punched in it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EogdalfXF4c&feature=related&fmt=18 [youtube.com]

The broken nanotube under high pressure has the advantage of having lots of other carbon atoms in a similar predicament close enough nearby that the tube's wall can reform, while the flat sheet simply falls apart due to its own tension and lattice vibrations.

Re:Cancer?

[wizardforce]

Nanotubes punch holes in cells like molecular needles which is why there's a lot of interest in making antimicrobial surfaces out of them.