Buckyballs Squeeze a Noble Gas Into One Dimension
A 2024 nanochemistry experiment that used Fuller-named "buckyballs" to trap krypton atoms in a single-file, one-dimensional gas.
In January 2024 a research team reported, in a journal of the American Chemical Society, that they had confined atoms of the noble gas krypton so tightly that they behaved as a one-dimensional gas. Using transmission electron microscopy, chemists at Ulm University and the University of Nottingham entrapped krypton inside a carbon nanotube whose diameter is roughly one five-hundred-thousandth that of a human hair. In that space the atoms could not slip past one another, so the distinction between individual atoms vanished and they formed a uniform single-file line—described by the researchers as the first direct imaging of chains of noble-gas atoms and the creation of a one-dimensional gas in a solid material.
The technique depended on buckminsterfullerene, the soccer-ball-shaped, 60-carbon molecule popularly called a "buckyball" and named after Buckminster Fuller for its resemblance to his geodesic domes. Each krypton atom was first caged inside a buckyball, which acted as a portable container and made the heavy krypton atoms easy to track as moving dots under the microscope. Heating to about 1,200 °C or irradiating with an electron beam then fused the buckyballs, releasing the krypton into a neat row inside the nanotube.
The result is chiefly of interest to fundamental science—studying how matter behaves under extreme confinement—but it is a vivid example of how the fullerene family that carries Fuller's name continues to serve as a working tool in modern chemistry and nanotechnology, decades after the molecule's 1985 discovery.
See Also
- R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the namesake of buckminsterfullerene
- Harold Kroto (link) — co-discoverer of buckminsterfullerene
- Richard Smalley (link) — co-discoverer of buckminsterfullerene
Sources
- Chemists Used Buckyballs to Squeeze a Noble Gas Into One Dimension (Gizmodo)