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Grad Student Makes Nanowires Just Three Atoms Thick
Science_afficionado (932920) writes "A Vanderbilt University graduate student, working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has discovered a way to create nanowires capable of linking transistors and other components made out of the monolayer material TMDC. His accomplishment is an important step toward creating monolayer microelectronic devices, which could be as thin and flexible as paper and extremely tough."
Bit of a bugger really, he was trying for cheese on toast.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But who gets the patent benefits.
Where do you think the nanowire filled products are going to be built?
Texas! \o/
sure, but they'll be 3inches thick. because as you know...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
and it has real promise to further the development of even tinier integrated circuits,
it will probably end up being marginalized to manufacture paper thick television monitors.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I will reserve my general snark regarding nanotechnology to highlight the fact these guys are putting the grad student up front and acknowledging that he really did all the work.
Could it be? An ethical professor? Professor Pantelides, Vanderbilt and Oak Ridge deserve a ton of credit for breaking the traditional assignment-of-credit mold here. Good job guys.
Lin made the tiny wires from a special family of semiconducting materials that naturally form monolayers. These materials, called transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), are made by combining the metals molybdenum or tungsten with either sulfur or selenium. The best-known member of the family is molybdenum disulfide, a common mineral that is used as a solid lubricant.
Other research groups have already created functioning transistors and flash memory gates out of TMDC materials. So the discovery of how to make wires provides the means for interconnecting these basic elements. Next to the transistors, wiring is one of the most important parts of an integrated circuit. Although today’s integrated circuits (chips) are the size of a thumbnail, they contain more than 20 miles of copper wiring.