One of sciences characteristics is that is is always evolving and changing. Little by little, we’ve come to have more 25 carbon materials of many shapes, sizes and properties. Now, we’ve achieve carbyne materialization on massive quantities: a unidimensional chain of more than 6,000 atoms, stronger, more resistent and flexible than any other carbon material, prevously considered imposible to make.
“My work with carbon started years ago, whe I was working on my graduation paper for Politécnica Nacional, with an solarship from Rio de Janeiro’s Catholic University”, with this words, Paola Ayala started the tale of her long relation with carbon. Paola, currently the Dean of the School of Physcal Science and Engineering at Yachay Tech, is a member if the group of researchers, from Austria, Japan, Spain and Germany, that managed to sintethise carbyne.
How was it posible and why does it matter?
Carbon is a very versatile and special element due to its composition: six electrons sorund its nucleus, four of them pair forming very solid conections that resulto on the formation of diverse materials wiith unic properties. One of this configurations, build with a chike wire-like structure, are Nanotubes. Even though a nanotube simple looks like black dust, because they are structures a billion times thiner than a hair, they give a large amount of posibilities to science due to their semiconductor and metalic properties. Now, Paola’s team has managed to use this nanotubes to demonstrate that is posible to materialize carbyne.
On 2010, scientists managed to sitheisis 44 carbon atoms on a unidiensional chain, using a stabilization in solution technique.
On 2003, a group of researchers sithesised a carbyne chain of a hundred atoms, inside nanotubes with more than a hundred walls. However, the amount of walls didn’t allow the use of carbyne’s intrinsic properties,
The trick, discovered on 2016, was to use only two nanotubes, one on the outside and one inserte on the inside, of the perfect diameter, to be the holder and perfect enviroment where more than 6,000 atoms could be sinthesised. Besides, making it posible to use carbyne properties.
Paola’s work with the Austria, Japan, Spain, Germany and Swiss team, has allowed us to creat new materials using carbyne properties. Carbyne has mechanical properties that exceed the ones of materials like diamond and graphene. Moreover other properties are spected to exceed the behavior of various material on new technological aplications. There’s a revolution coming.
