When I left the lab last Friday, the Chemist was hovering around the nanotube machine. All afternoon, he'd been saying how he had high hopes for this run. By the time I left, he was itching to open up the oven and run his sample over to another research facility where the scanning tunneling microscope is located. He had to wait, however, until the machine cooled down enough that he could open it up without the sudden temperature change destroying his sample. Oh, and so that he could open it without getting third-degree burns, but the possibility of damage to his own flesh was about as far from his mind as, say, grain prices in Nebraska. The machine cools down at a rate of 100 °C per hour and although the gauge still read 350 °C, he was fussing around with his special tweezers so that he'd be ready in two and a half hours when he could finally grab his sample.
Today he had a load of digital images from the STM. He had indeed managed to produce single-walled nanotubes, but they lay down parallel to the substrate surface instead of standing up like he wanted. "See? And they are curly too. And this gray area"—the whole image is basically a gray area, but anyway—"is amorphous carbon. Not what I want, but I am getting closer. Here," he says clicking around and showing me more images. "This is from the run on the second. You can see how these tubes have multiple walls." He points to thin, parallel lines around a lozenge-shaped nanotube. "But the multiple-walled kind are better for making devices because they are straight."
Cool. I've been wondering why we even have a nanotube machine in my section, which is all electronics and has nothing whatsoever to do with chemistry. I found out when Dr. Science drifted through one day to show off the Hamsters. He said that someday the Hamster data-collection process would use nanotube-based sensors.
Is this long range planning or what?
338 words | July 12, 2004 08:07 PM | Rocket science