World's thinnest electrical wire?

Scientists from Stanford University have developed the thinnest possible electrical wires, a mere three atoms wide, according to a report on ScienceAlert.

The process uses tiny bits of diamonds — diamondoids — which are made into a string and attached to sulfur and copper atoms and the resulting links could be utilised in fabrics that generate electricity through movement.

One of the project researchers, Hao Yan, said, "What we have shown here is that we can make tiny, conductive wires of the smallest possible size that essentially assemble themselves.

"The process is a simple, one-pot synthesis. You dump the ingredients together and you can get results in half an hour. It's almost as if the diamondoids know where they want to go," Hao said.

According to the report, the diamondoids, which occur naturally in petroleum fluids, are small cage-like structures made of carbon and hydrogen and they are strongly attracted to one another through van der Waals forces. That attraction makes each diamondoid link up with the next in the chain. Once bonded to the single copper and sulfur atom, the attraction forms a wire-like structure.

"Much like LEGO blocks, they only fit together in certain ways that are determined by their size and shape," researcher Fei Hua Li said.

"The copper and sulfur atoms of each building block wound up in the middle, forming the conductive core of the wire, and the bulkier diamondoids wound up on the outside, forming the insulating shell."

Although other work has seen the development of electrical current conducting nanotechnology, this is the smallest development yet and the researchers are now substituting new materials (cadmium, zinc, iron and silver) in place of copper and sulfur to see what other kinds of nanowires they can create.

The research report was published in the journal Nature Materials late last year.