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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)."
Do these have useful properties at all? Where's the (wild and unfounded) speculation?
paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.2080
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
A Mobius strip is bad for your back.
I think I'll just stick with the Pole strip for now thanks.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
Can you imagine a Klien Bottle made of these?
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
Will this do anything for bicycle frames?
Yes. Now you'll be able to rid a bike on Venus. You'll disintegrate in 30 seconds but the bike frame won't. Have a nice ride.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Of course, it'll allow manufacturers to gyp 50-year-old men who aren't quite committed enough to their mid-life crises to buy sports cars into paying an extra $2k for Mobius bike frames that shave an extra 200 grammes off the weight of a 6kg bike. These men will then lean said bikes against the railings of expensive snobby coffee shops at 7am and drink coffee while pretending that it's OK to sit around wearing brightly coloured skintight lycra when you're over 50. Sadly, they will never actually realise that the whole point of a 'cafe racer' bike was that it HAD AN ENGINE.
Also, Mobius bike frames will have the added bonus that they even more easily pretzel into a mobius strip themselves when confronted with a kerb, pot-hole or other such part of the Real World.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Well, it will still be made up of graphene when it comes to looking at atomic energy levels. Band gap is the primary source of light interactions, and as it will still be close to zero band gap (unless the asymmetry thrown into long range hybridization screws it up in ways I am not thinking of), and should be absorbing most photons.
So, it'll probably look the same as graphite, but would probably diffract photons with wavelenghts like 10nm due to it having a longer-range crystal structure than normal crystals (which only diffract in the X-rays). The crystals might do things like diffract in the high energy UV, assuming the UV doesn't all get absorbed by the graphite.
Graphene has some pretty interesting electronic properties. Its bandgap (the essential component of all semiconductors)
Graphene is a semimetal. The bandgap is zero in suspended graphene. Epitaxial graphene on SiC has a small gap (0.1meV) but below Fermi level, so not very useful.
can be manipulated by changing the length of the sheet; as the sheet becomes infinitely long, the bandgap approaches zero.
Not correct. The bandgap of a narrow ribbon depends on the width (not the length) of the ribbon. Above 10nm there is no gap, below there is, regardless how long it is.
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).
Well, this is totally unrelated as electron-hole pair recombination requires a junction.
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).
No. mobility is finite, because you need to take into account of the so called saturation velocity. Besides, near-zero doesn't mean zero, so conceptually the two are completely different.
Will these Mobius strips have ants on them? ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Water boils at 373K. If you call 127K a "handful of degrees" you are either an american or a retard with really big hands. 500 Kelvin = 226.85 Celsius (water boils at 100c)
Article seems a little ... one-sided.
I'll get my coat.
Ydco co