Sometimes pure carbon can turn to jelly. That鈥檚 what at the University of Bristol, UK, found when he simulated cooling carbon cages called buckyballs.
The simulation heated the balls, which have been an object of fascination since their discovery in 1995, to over 2000鈥壜癈 and then cooled them in less than a billionth of a second. This caused a loosely connected solid network to emerge that behaved like a wobbly gel.
Conventional gels consist of small liquid molecules trapped in a network of larger solid molecules. This is the first example of a gel made of just a solid network. 鈥淟iquid is not a prerequisite for a gel,鈥� concludes Royall 鈥� the network is the crucial component.
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Rotating plates
The experiment is currently not feasible in practice, but since we now know that a buckyball gel is a possibility, Royall suggests trying to make it in other ways.
One option might be to cool the buckyballs between two rotating plates that would prevent them from forming solid crystals, he suggests. 鈥淚鈥檓 convinced it鈥檚 possible.鈥�
But , who researches condensed matter at the University of Edinburgh, UK, stresses that the simulation will be hard to reproduce in the real world. 鈥淢aking the real stuff will be much harder than creating it in a computer,鈥� he says.
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