Self-Assembling, Nanometer-Scale Wires

savi writes: "An experiment that University of Chicago physicists conducted just for fun has unexpectedly led them to a new technique for producing nanoscale structures. "This is perhaps the first time that it has been possible to assemble large numbers of parallel, continuous wires that are truly nanometer scale in cross-section," said Heinrich Jaeger, Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago. Check it out here."

Comments

Re:Theoretical limits of electricity

[caffeinated_bunsen]

The theoretical limit is one atom wide, on the order of ~2-5 angstroms (10^-10 m) for most metals. These wires are quoted as 10nm, or 100 angstroms across. That works out to about 50 atoms across for silver (face-centered cubic cell 4.09 angstroms on a side, 2 layers of atoms per cell), if I looked up the right value in the table.

Now back to studying for that solid state physics final.