In a feat that puts Rumpelstiltskin to shame, scientists have spun a multitude of high tech materials into bundles of superfine nanowires that are more than 1000 meters long. The new technique, reported online June 12 in Nature Materials, easily produces uniform, orderly arrays of gossamer-thin materials that could have broad use in sensors, energy-harvesting devices and medical diagnostics.
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It’s not often that the prefixes nano and kilo, which span 12 orders of magnitude, come together, says study leader Mehmet Bayindir of the Institute of Materials Science and Nanotechnology at Bilkent University in Turkey. But a modern take on the spinning wheel allowed Bayindir and his team to draw nano threads that are mere billionths of a meter across out to kilometer lengths.
The work is another step forward in science’s mastery of tiny materials for big, bold applications. While there has been a lot of success in fabricating nanosized materials from similarly small ingredients, it has been harder to trim big bulky starting materials down to nanosize. This spring, MIT researchers successfully created semiconducting wires embedded in a fiber by tweaking a top-down setup that’s employed in industry to make spools of polyester.