Wonder wire puts up no resistance
A wire made from a perfect crystal can transmit electricity with no resistance
Nanotube devices in the pipeline
New insights into the electronics of nanotubes could bring real devices a step closer
A new spin on magnets
The spin on electrons could be used to create super-dense recording media
The great atom race
Atoms move through the crystal lattice of a solid by a process called diffusion. The atoms migrate by swapping places with ‘point defects’ such as vacancies – empty spaces in the lat...
Physicist shares Nobel prize for chemistry
Heeger, MacDiarmid and Shirakawa made their breakthrough in the late 1970s, when they discovered that the electrical conductivity of a certain form of polyacetylene increased by a factor of ten millio...
Hendrik Casimir and John Ward
Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir was born in the Hague in the Netherlands in 1909 and received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1931. After working with Bohr in Copenhagen and Pauli in Zurich, he...
Fractional effects in nanotubes explained
The quantum of conductance, G0, is defined by a simple equation: G0=2e2/h, where e is the charge on the electron and h is the Planck constant. The conductance of an individual nanotube is predicted to...
Conductivity measurements made on a single strand of DNA
The Delft group fabricated the electrodes by making a slit in a silicon nitride film with standard lithography. A series of platinum layers were then sputtered across the slit until the gap was reduce...
Electron transfer made easy
Electron transfer in protein results from quantum tunnelling between reduction- oxidation (redox) centres. “There’s a widely accepted idea that electrons get from one redox centre to anoth...
DNA is a semiconductor
Fink and Schönenberger made their measurements by placing discrete amounts of DNA molecules in a water-based solution. A tiny droplet of the solution was then placed onto a gold-coated carbon foi...
