Scientists have created the world’s thinnest wires yet—and they’re made of atoms coated in diamonds. These nanometer-scale wires could help cram more computing power into even-smaller devices.
A team of scientists from Stanford University and the US Department of Energy recently took molecule-sized diamond fragments, attached them to atoms of sulfur, and dropped them into a solution with copper atoms. The result: a wire three atoms across sheathed in diamond. In addition, the wire assembled itself, like a set of Lego bricks spontaneously coming together to make a structure. The team published the results of their work Dec. 26 in Nature Materials.
As QZ has it, “put together diamonds, copper, and sulfur, and you can make the thinnest wires humanly possible. These nanometer-scale wires could help shrink electronic circuits, cramming more computing power into ever-smaller devices, and allow researchers to explore exotic material physics”
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