TINY hollow needles of carbon known as buckytubes, hailed as the nanoscale
material of the future for electronics and catalysis, could soon be manufactured
to order by chemists.
Buckytubes are made from rolled-up concentric sheets of carbon atoms. But
they are not yet commercially available because existing methods of making them
are crude and expensive. That could all change, however, thanks to a
breakthrough by chemists at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany.
They are just one step away from building a buckytube through orthodox chemical
methods.
Chemists currently make buckytubes by vaporising carbon at temperatures as
high as 10 000 掳C. 鈥淯nder these drastic conditions, it鈥檚 difficult to make
tubes that are of uniform dimensions,鈥� says Rainer Herges, head of the team that
is pioneering the new approach at the university鈥檚 institute for organic
chemistry. Herges and his colleagues have succeeded in making 鈥減icotubes鈥�, which
resemble buckytubes but are much smaller. Whereas buckytube needles are
typically at least 200 nanometres long, the new picotubes are just 0.82
nanometres long.
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The team created the picotubes by exposing a tubular compound called
tetradehydrodianthracene to ultraviolet light for 10 hours. Herges and his
colleagues now plan to eliminate the hydrogen from the picotubes and so produce
the first buckytube made through chemical synthesis (Angewandte Chemie,
vol 35, p 2669).