Chemistry Nexus
by WebElements: the periodic table on the web
Carbon nanotube emits light
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory reports that scientists at the US Brookhaven National Laboratory and the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center caused an individual carbon nanotube to emit light for the first time. This may have significance for many of the proposed applications for carbon nanotubes including in electronics and photonics.
The light emission is the result of a process called “electron-hole recombination.”
WebElements December 13th, 2009
Posted In: Chemistry, Nanoscience and nanotechnology
NanoFoam
Nature reports that a new form of carbon was created when physicists at the Australian National University in bombarded a carbon target with a laser. As the carbon reached temperatures of around 10000 °C, it formed an intersecting web of carbon tubes called a ‘nanofoam’. This is said to be a fifth form of carbon known after graphite, diamond, buckminsterfullerenes (buckyballs), and nanotubes.
WebElements December 9th, 2009
Posted In: Chemistry, Nanoscience and nanotechnology
Tags: allotropes, Carbon
Go to work on a terbium nitride buckyegg
An egg-shaped fullerene, or “buckyball egg” has been made and characterized by chemists in America at UC Davis (California), Virginia Tech, and Emory and Henry College in Virginia. They were trying to encapsulate terbium atoms within fullerenes but instead encapsulated terbium nitride within an egg-shaped fullerene. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja063636k]
The compound Tb3N@C84 was synthesized using an arc-discharge generator by vaporizing composite graphite rods containing a mixture of Tb4O7, graphite, and iron nitride as catalyst in a low-pressure He/N2atmosphere.
WebElements August 6th, 2006
Posted In: Chemistry, Crystallography, Nanoscience and nanotechnology
Flexible nanomembranes
Workers at The University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA have managed to release thin membranes of semiconductors from a substrate and transfer them to new surfaces.1
The freed membranes which are just tens of nanometers thick retain all the properties of silicon in wafer form but the nanomembranes are flexible. By varying the thicknesses of the silicon and silicon-germanium layers composing them, membrane shapes are possible ranging from flat to curved to tubular.Potential
WebElements June 2nd, 2006
Posted In: Chemistry, Materials chemistry, Nanoscience and nanotechnology
Tags: nanomembranes, Silicon
Bucky Balls codiscoveror Richard Smalley dies
Nobel laureate Richard Smalley, the Rice University professor who helped discover buckyballs (buckminsterfullerene, C60, the football (soccer) ball shaped form of carbon, died at the age of 62.
Richard Smalley shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Sir Harold Kroto (Sussex) and Robert Curl (also Rice) for the identification of the new form of carbon known as buckminsterfullerene because of its similarity to Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes.
WebElements October 28th, 2005
Posted In: Chemistry, Nanoscience and nanotechnology
Tags: buckyballs, fullerenes