Carbon pods are more than a pack of peas
In a step toward a postsilicon age of microelectronics, researchers have found that they can manipulate the electronic character of nanoscopic carbon structures.
The researchers worked with hollow, 1-nanometer-wide carbon nanotubes, which they stuffed pea pod style with buckyballs–soccer ball-shape molecules of 60 carbon atoms.
The buckyball-filled nanotubes were first created in 1998 by David E. Luzzi of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his colleagues. In the Feb. 1 Science, a team including Luzzi, his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, and researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign reports that the molecular peas change the electronic properties of their carbon pods.