New Form of "Mobius" Carbon Predicted

KentuckyFC writes "We've seen carbon nanotubes, buckyballs, and chickenwire. Now materials scientists have created a computer model of a Mobius strip fashioned from strips of graphene — a molecule that would have a single surface and only one edge. (Other groups have made Mobius-like organic molecules but never out of carbon sheets.) The model allows the researchers to determine the physical and chemical properties of the molecules and how these depend on the number of twists in the strip. The team says, for example, that 'Mobius carbon' should be stable to temperatures of at least 500 Kelvin (abstract). But the most exciting prediction is that strips with an odd number of half twists should have a dipole moment that would cause them to self-organize into a crystal. That implies that there's a new type of carbon made entirely of Mobius strips ready to be made by any chemists with a good supply of graphene (maybe these guys)."

Comments

Insight required

[w0mprat]

Do these have useful properties at all? Where's the (wild and unfounded) speculation?

paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.2080

Re:Insight required

[elashish14]

Graphene has some pretty interesting electronic properties. Its bandgap (the essential component of all semiconductors) can be manipulated by changing the length of the sheet; as the sheet becomes infinitely long, the bandgap approaches zero. As a result, it could hold potential in photovoltaics for light capture or LEDs for light emission where capture/emission is tunable based on the size of the particle (which is pretty easy to manipulate).

Another article popped up on Slashdot recently suggesting graphene could be used for super high-capacity memory storage: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F18%2F2332251.

From the paper they mention that active electrons have near-zero effective mass. Since electron mobility is inversely proportional to effective mass, resistivity approaches zero (in essence, we approach superconductivity). As far as twisted graphene ribbons go, the paper only mentions that there's some weird ground state orbital morphologies (triplet states and open singlet ground states) which I'm not familiar with but also have to do with interorbital transition which always has applications in light emission/absorption technologies. I believe that lasers heavily depend on triplet states to create inversion layers, but don't quote me on that.

As far as it goes anyway, even if you don't know what the properties will be, you might as well study it - you never know what's going to come out.

one side chemical reactions... interesting

[StupidPeopleTrick]

I am wondering the chemistry applications of this. I bet you can make some very interesting compounds out of this material. A one sided molecule kind of redefines limiting agent would it not? - StupidPeopleTrick

Re:one side chemical reactions... interesting

[onepoint]

I am having a hard time picturing a 1 sided molecule. I would guess I can picture 2 sides ( top / bottom ) but 1 side? way more advanced than I can currently think, can someone offer an example.

Re:one side chemical reactions... interesting

[MrNaz]

To be honest, calling a Mobius Strip "one sided" is not strictly correct. It's just a twist that causes one side to join with the other such that all points on both sides can be traced to each other without having to traverse an edge. Clever, yes. Truly one-sided in the dimension collapsing sense? No.

Mobius Strips are great for befuddling stupid people though. If you tell the average person that you can show them a piece of paper with one side they laugh. Then you give them a Mobius Strip and a pencil, draw a dot on it and ask them to draw a line along the strip. When they meet up you can almost hear their brains grinding gears.

Taking the piss out of idiots FTW!