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According to Raydiance, the R-Cut combines an ultra-short pulse laser and micromachining processes to cut very hard and brittle materials very quickly and with less chance of their chiping or shattering. It’s based on a femtosecond laser, which is generated by a technique called chirped pulse amplification that produces a burst of laser light that lasts one quadrillionth of a second. This is so short that during its pulse, the laser will only travel 1/100th the width of a human hair.
What’s important about this laser is that these very tiny pulses of light can concentrate so much power in such a small space of time that they can destroy anything they touch, and the laser can fire these pulses many times a second. The R-Cut uses these pulses in "cold ablation" for drilling very precise holes or shaping materials. The femtosecond laser vaporizes matter so fast that the surrounding materials have no time to heat up and there’s much less of a shock wave than with longer-duration lasers. The trick is to apply enough power in a short enough time to remove material without stressing the surrounding area.
Michael Mielke, Chief Scientist at Raydiance told Gizmag that the company has used fiber optics and developed algorithms that allow the R-Cut to take the femtosecond laser from being a laboratory curiosity and make it into an industrial tool that can quickly cut brittle materials in a matter of seconds instead of minutes or hours.
Aimed at high-volume manufacturers, the R-Cut can handle Gorilla glass, sapphire crystals, and similar hard and brittle materials. It can work on thinner materials than previously possible and form them into complex shapes, such as curves, chamfers, and holes on a micron scale, with less waste and at lower costs providing savings of more than 50 percent. The company also says that it can work on both strengthened and unstrengthened glass while doubling efficiency.
"The laser is fully programmable, which eliminates a lot of the hard-tooling with the mechanical approaches," says Stefan Zschiegner, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Raydiance. "You can basically take a design drawing and in 24 hours you have a fully functioning prototype."
With precarious particles called polaritons that straddle the worlds of light and matter, University of Michigan researchers have demonstrated a new, practical and potentially more efficient way to make a coherent laser-like beam.
They have made what's believed to be the first polariton laser that is fueled by electrical current as opposed to light, and also works at room temperature, rather than way below zero.
Those attributes make the device the most real-world ready of the handful of polariton lasers ever developed. It represents a milestone like none the field has seen since the invention of the most common type of laser – the semiconductor diode – in the early 1960s, the researchers say. While the first lasers were made in the 1950s, it wasn't until the semiconductor version, fueled by electricity rather than light, that the technology took off.
(Phys.org) —Scientists have discovered a material that has the same extraordinary electronic properties as 2-D graphene, but in a sturdy 3-D form that should be much easier to shape into electronic devices such as very fast transistors, sensors and transparent electrodes.
The material, cadmium arsenide, is being explored independently by three groups, one of which includes researchers at the University of Oxford, SLAC, Stanford and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who described their results in a paper published May 25 in Nature Materials.
"Now more and more people realize the potential in the science and technology of this particular material. This growing interest will promote rapid progress in the field – including the exploration of its use in functional devices and the search for similar materials," said Yulin Chen of the University of Oxford, who led the research.
The group's work builds on its earlier studies of a sodium bismuth compound that also mimics graphene but turns to powder when exposed to air. Both compounds had been predicted by co-authors Zhong Fang and Xi Dai, theoretical physicists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who suggested that cadmium arsenide, which is used in detectors and sensors, would provide the same properties in a much more stable form.
Their prediction proved correct, said Zhongkai Liu, the paper's first author and a graduate student at SIMES, the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences at SLAC. "The environmental stability of cadmium arsenide allows us to explore it very systematically, and makes it easier to study," he said.
Graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms peeled from a piece of graphite, which is familiar as the lead in pencils. One of its hallmarks is the weird behavior of its electrons: When confined to this thin layer of regularly spaced atoms, these lightweight particles act as if they have no mass at all. This allows them to zip through the material much faster than usual. The scientists who first isolated graphene in 2004 were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics; and researchers have been racing to explore its properties and find practical uses for it ever since.
One such quest has been to find graphene-like materials that are three-dimensional, and thus much easier to craft into practical devices. Two other international collaborations based at Princeton University and in Dresden, Germany, have also been pursuing cadmium arsenide as a possibility. One published a paper on its results in the May 7 issue of Nature Communications, and the other has posted an unpublished paper on the preprint server arXiv.
Pick-and-place (PNP) machines are the robots that grab and drop tiny components onto circuit boards. Designed to make thousands of boards an hour, these super-fast machines are part of the multi-part ballet that is modern manufacturing. And they’re amazingly expensive – sometimes reaching into the millions of dollars.
The Holy Grail, then, for the home-brew manufacturer is to build a PNP machine on a small scale. Two engineers, Neil Jansen and Karl Lew, have dealt with the almost constant frustration of wanting to build cool hardware yet having no way to build usable circuit boards without expensive investments. By creating a very simple, very cheap PNP machine, they would enable a new electronics maker movement to blossom where, until now, the big boys held sway.
The project is still in its infancy and the pair are now trying to enter the next HAXLR8R class in order to fine-tune their idea. The goal is to create a simple pick-and-place machine that can lift and rotate parts using suction, draw traces onto boards, and solder and remove components from the board. A CNC attachment would allow users to cut down PCBs to size and a laser would allow them to plot onto photo-sensitive boards. It’s not quite Foxconn but it’s good enough for 90% of the hardware projects out there.
What’s most interesting about this project is that it looks to be the first one that both works, in prototype, and could actually come to market. There are many hacks you can use to create your own PNP machines – you can even turn a standard 3D printer into a PNP with a lot of gumption – but a ready-made, tested device for the home electronics maker would me amazing. The team is also looking into creating a printing system that can extrude both plastic and electronic components which would create truly organic, cohesive products that used fewer resources and were more rugged.
You can see the first few open source documents here related to the manufacture. Because the FirePick is a delta machine it uses fewer parts and is less complex to build. In fact, it’s much like a 3D printer in that the head moves in certain pre-set patterns, over and over, until it produces a finished product.
As the Navy prepares to deploy its first laser weapon on a ship later this summer, Office of Naval Research (ONR) officials announced June 11 that they have finished awarding contracts to develop a similar weapon to be used on ground vehicles.
The Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy On-the-Move program, commonly referred to as GBAD, aims to provide an affordable alternative to traditional firepower to keep enemy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from tracking and targeting Marines on the ground.
ONR is working with Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division and industry partners on the development of GBAD's components and subsystems, including the laser itself, beam director, batteries, radar, advanced cooling, and communications and command and control.
"We're confident we can bring together all of these pieces in a package that's small enough to be carried on light tactical vehicles and powerful enough to counter these threats," said Brig. Gen. Kevin Killea, vice chief of naval research and commanding general, the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory.
Will 3D printing ever, in a million years, be faster than injection molding? 3D Systems announced this week a breakthrough - for the first time ever, its fab-grade 3D printers effectively matched and exceeded the productivity of traditional injection molding in the direct manufacture of functional parts.
"Our unwavering commitment to customer success through innovation has literally broken the mold this time – challenging the myth that 3D printing can't match the productivity of injection molding," said Cathy Lewis, 3DS' CMO. "This is just the beginning. We are working on additional applications that defy traditional manufacturing constraints, allowing our customers to go from idea to product in hours, instead of months - to truly manufacture the future."
This breakthrough opens up the possibility of just-in-time, high volume flexible additive manufacturing using 3D printing technology. 3D Systems pointed out, while injection molding is not getting any faster because the technology is mature, 3D printing technology has been tremendously improved over the last 20~30 years. "We're doubling 3D printer capabilities every 18 months." 3D Systems said. But how could that happen? "Lots of R&D, better material, more powerful lasers, bigger machines. There's lots more at work." 3D Systems said.
Deep within the Earth's rocky mantle lies oceans' worth of water locked up in a type of mineral called ringwoodite, new research shows.
The results of the study will help scientists understand Earth's water cycle, and how plate tectonics moves water between the surface of the planet and interior reservoirs, researchers say.
The Earth's mantle is the hot, rocky layer between the planet's core and crust. Scientists have long suspected that the mantle's so-called transition zone, which sits between the upper and lower mantle layers 255 to 410 miles (410 to 660 kilometers) below Earth's surface, could contain water trapped in rare minerals. However, direct evidence for this water has been lacking, until now.
To see if the transition zone really is a deep reservoir for water, researchers conducted experiments on water-rich ringwoodite, analyzed seismic waves travelling through the mantle beneath the United States, and studied numerical models. They discovered that downward-flowing mantle material is melting as it crosses the boundary between the transition zone and the lower mantle layer.
"If we are seeing this melting, then there has to be this water in the transition zone," said Brandon Schmandt, a seismologist at the University of New Mexico and co-author of the new study published today (June 12) in the journal Science. "The transition zone can hold a lot of water, and could potentially have the same amount of H2O [water] as all the world's oceans." (Melting is a way of getting rid of water, which is unstable under conditions in Earth's lower mantle, the researchers said.)
It's getting harder to find people to work on farms in the US – robo-farmers are shifting plants and could soon be picking strawberries in their place
HACKNEY Nursery in northern Florida has just hired its first fleet of robots.
The nursery specialises in woody ornamentals and perennials, heavy plants that grow in large tubs across several hundred hectares of land. A typical day at the nursery might require carrying as many as 5000 of these plants around. In the past, this tedious and back-breaking work took four men the better part of a working day.
Now, four HV100s – nicknamed Harveys by Harvest Automation, the Boston company that makes them – work just nine hours a day. The robots zip autonomously around the nursery, spacing plants farther apart as they grow and then scooping them back together when it's time for a sale. A person monitors their work.
Hackney is one of 20 nurseries and greenhouses in the US that have started using Harveys this year. It's another example of agriculture's enthusiastic shift towards automation. While other sectors are concerned that robots might take their jobs, many farmers are greeting technology with open arms.
"Our experience has been fantastic. I think it's the way of the future," says Joseph Hackney, who works at the nursery. "The robots are doing jobs that people don't want to do."
In the past, agricultural work in the US was generally carried out by low-paid immigrants. But their numbers have dwindled, a shift that's been attributed in part to stricter border enforcement, but also an improving economy in Mexico, where most immigrants are from. This shortage will worsen over the coming years, suggests a 2012 study by Edward Taylor and colleagues at the University of California-Davis and The College of Mexico in Mexico City.
3D printers are great at creating small objects – and some can even be pressed into doing larger things, such as cars – but a 3D printer able to print a full-sized house would have to be, well, bigger than a house. To tackle this problem, a team of researchers from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) in Barcelona removed the size restrictions of a printer altogether by using mobile 3D printer robots to print directly on site.
Though other structures have been printed in 3D – such as low-cost housing in China – these are produced piecemeal off site and have to be transported. This is where the IAAC concept is unique; it 3D prints structures in one continuous process, so that a building can be formed layer by layer in place.
The robots used have been dubbed "Minibuilders" because of their diminutive stature, the largest being just 16.5 in (42 cm) wide. These robots make up a team of three that all carry out different functions in the process, working independently on their own task but in coordination with each other on the overall work. Each Minibuilder performs its role in order using instructions provided by a central computer, in conjunction with its own sensors and local positioning systems. One other robot – a "Supplier" robot – provides the liquid building material to each of the Minibuilders, as required.
To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, there was a time when 3D metal printing was like a dog walking on his hind legs – it wasn't done well; but you were surprised to find it done at all. Now that laser sintering or Selective Laser Melting (SLM) is used for everything from printing rocket engine components to semi-automatic pistols, the time for surprise may b long past, but the technology still has plenty of room for improvement. That's why researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are working on simulations to improve the speed of 3D laser printing and the quality of the final product by using higher-powered lasers.
SLM is a form of additive printing where, instead of squirting melted plastic out like cake icing, an object is built up layer by layer using metal powder that’s melted into a pool by a high-power laser. As each layer is fused into the desired shape, the printer adds another layer of powder and the process repeats until the printing is completed. Then, you remove the excess powder, give the printed object a polish, and you’re done.
The problem is that 3D printing is rapidly developing from a novelty into a mainstream manufacturing technique. That means that processes like SLM need to improve quickly in terms of predictability, quality, and speed of output. In the case of SLM, a key question is how to get the resulting metal as close as possible to full density in as short a time as possible.
You know how a princess can feel a pea through 20 mattresses and 20 feather beds? Well, not any more. Researchers in Germany have created the first mechanical invisibility cloak. When this cloak is placed over an object, the object cannot be felt at all — either by your finger, or a more sensitive measuring device. This has obvious repercussions for the authentication of fairytale princesses, and also in the realm of camping (die, tree roots, die) and carpeting (cabling begone!) Personally, I hope someone takes this mechanical invisibility material and creates the world’s first sock that is immune to the terrifying strength of errant-in-the-night Lego bricks.
If you’ve been following ExtremeTech for a while, you’ll know that we’ve covered plenty of invisibility cloaks, all of wildly varying form and function. There have been some “conventional” cloaks that hide objects from visible light, but also lots that cloak against microwaves, sound waves, and various other forms of radiation. A mechanical invisibility cloak, however, is something new.
Researchers speculate that the material could have a deep impact on the aerospace and automotive industries.
According to Aerogel.org, the materials are the world’s lightest solid materials, composed of up to 99.98 percent air by volume. Aerogels are a diverse class of amazing materials with properties unlike anything else. Transparent superinsulating silica aerogels exhibit the lowest thermal conductivity of any solid known. Ultrahigh surface area carbon aerogels power today’s fast-charging supercapacitors. In addition, ultrastrong, bendable x-aerogels are the lowest-density structural materials ever developed.
However, according to a report from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), researchers have developed a material so light it’s called “frozen smoke,” and it has a stiffness 10,000 times greater than aerogel.
Researchers speculate that the material could have a deep impact on the aerospace and automotive industries, in addition to other applications where lightweight, high-stiffness and high-strength materials are needed.
LLNL and MIT researchers developed a material possessing these properties by means of additive micro-manufacturing processes. The findings appear today in the journal Science, in an article titled, “Ultralight, Ultrastiff Mechanical Metamaterials.” The article describes the team’s development of micro-architected metamaterials that retain a virtually constant stiffness per unit mass density, even at ultralow density.
A flock of passenger pigeons once darkened the Ontario skies for 15 hours straight while the animals were migrating.
It’s been almost a century since the death of Martha, the world’s last passenger pigeon at the Cincinatti Zoo, passing 14 years after the species had become extinct in the wild. It was one of the first cases of animal extinction that drew scientific attention.
Less than a century earlier, a flock of billions darkened the Ontario skies for 15 hours straight while the animals were migrating – an entire flock that stretched for 300 miles, and was one mile deep. So common were the passenger pigeon at the end of the nineteenth century that they were considered a poor man’s food – served in enormous quantities to domestic servants who often grew tired of the taste.
Martha gained some significant attention after she died, preserved in a block of ice for visitors at the Smithsonian Institution, as she was studied by ornithologists who hoped to prevent a future instance of species extinction.
Today, she rests on the shelf of the Smithsonian ornithology lab, but her significance has only increased – as scientists from the non-profit genetic research organization Revive & Restore are seeking to recreate a flock of passenger pigeons from the DNA of scientific collections and believe that the science will be possible over the course of the next decade.
A world record that has stood for more than a decade has been broken by a team led by University of Cambridge engineers, harnessing the equivalent of three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china.
The Cambridge researchers managed to 'trap' a magnetic field with a strength of 17.6 Tesla - roughly 100 times stronger than the field generated by a typical fridge magnet - in a high temperature gadolinium barium copper oxide (GdBCO) superconductor, beating the previous record by 0.4 Tesla. The results are published today in the journal Superconductor Science and Technology.
The research demonstrates the potential of high-temperature superconductors for applications in a range of fields, including flywheels for energy storage, 'magnetic separators', which can be used in mineral refinement and pollution control, and in high-speed levitating monorail trains.
Superconductors are materials that carry electrical current with little or no resistance when cooled below a certain temperature. While conventional superconductors need to be cooled close to absolute zero (zero degrees on the Kelvin scale, or -273.15 °C) before they superconduct, high temperature superconductors do so above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (-196 °C), which makes them relatively easy to cool and cheaper to operate.
Superconductors are currently used in scientific and medical applications, such as MRI scanners, and in the future could be used to protect the national grid and increase energy efficiency, due to the amount of electrical current they can carry without losing energy.
The current carried by a superconductor also generates a magnetic field, and the more field strength that can be contained within the superconductor, the more current it can carry. State of the art, practical superconductors can carry currents that are typically 100 times greater than copper, which gives them considerable performance advantages over conventional conductors and permanent magnets.
The new record was achieved using 25 mm diameter samples of GdBCO high temperature superconductor fabricated in the form of a large, single grain using an established melt processing method and reinforced using a relatively simple technique. The previous record of 17.2 Tesla, set in 2003 by a team led by Professor Masato Murakami from the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Japan, used a highly specialised type of superconductor of a similar, but subtly different, composition and structure.
Western Australian researchers believe they are first to develop a model for accurately estimating local water temperature in near real-time for marine protected areas (MPAs).
The model is more accurate than others because it allows for different seasonal patterns in water temperature.
The group used sea surface temperature (SST) data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch (CRW) program and in situ temperature data from four WA MPAs to test the model.
The CRW provides marine managers and researchers with access to near real-time SST updates globally.
Lettuce See the Future: Japanese Farmer Builds High-Tech Indoor Veggie Factory - GE ReportsHumans have spent the last 10,000 years mastering agriculture. But a freak summer storm or bad drought can still mar many a well-planted harvest. Not anymore, says Japanese plant physiologist Shigeharu Shimamura, who has moved industrial-scale farming under the roof.
Working in Miyagi Prefecture in eastern Japan, which was badly hit by powerful earthquake and tsunamis in 2011, Shimamura turned a former Sony Corporation semiconductor factory into the world’s largest indoor farm illuminated by LEDs. The special LED fixtures were developed by GE and emit light at wavelengths optimal for plant growth.
The farm is nearly half the size of a football field (25,000 square feet). It opened on July and it is already producing 10,000 heads of lettuce per day. “I knew how to grow good vegetables biologically and I wanted to integrate that knowledge with hardware to make things happen,” Shimamura says.
The US Office of Naval Research (ONR) has integrated two prototype electro-magnetic (EM) railgun weapons on the joint high-speed vessel (JHSV) USS Millinocket, at the Naval Base San Diego.
Until now, the prototypes had been tested and fired in a lab setting.
Scheduled for testing in a maritime environment in 2016, the prototypes, developed by BAE Systems and General Atomics, will undergo at-sea demonstrations, marking a significant step forward in naval combat for the US Navy.
Launched at high velocities to accomplish greater ranges than traditional guns, the projectiles sustain sufficient kinetic energy, while eliminating the requirement of a high explosive payload when they reach the target.
Each projectile costs approximately $25,000, which is 100 times less than a traditional missile.
The three designs above won a NASA competition to envision the next generation of hurricane surveillance drones.
The agency asked teams to develop an unmanned aerial system (UAS) that could stay aloft for seven days at a time and offer persistent remote sensing over a period of five months. That timeframe covers a typical Atlantic hurricane season, and the agency’s goal is to closely follow storm formation from when a tropical wave moves off Africa’s west coast through the full life cycle of the weather system.
Current UASs used for tropical storm monitoring are similar to the military Global Hawk surveillance and security platform, and can only stay aloft for 24 hours at a time before they need to come home.
“The data gathered by UASs is crucial to refining computer models so we can better predict not just the path of these storms, but also the process of hurricane formation and growth,” said NASA aerospace engineer Craig Nickol in a statement. “This is where current systems fall short.”
Nickol was the technical lead for the contest, which awarded first place ton a design from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The student engineering team’s plan calls for two aircraft, each able to stay airborne for 7.8 days straight. Their proposed vehicle, which they snarkily named Gobble Hawk as a nod to its military predecessor, would be fueled by liquid hydrogen and come with a price tag of almost $200 million for production and 10 years of service.
Purdue University’s team took second place and the University of Virginia grabbed third. Click on the images of their designs for some more info.
Other work at the University of Florida is looking to put much smaller drones right into the eye of hurricanes to get more needed data to better understand these weather systems.
US military research agency DARPA intends to cut the average time to develop new advanced materials from 10 years to less than three.
Military platforms – such as ships, aircraft and ground vehicles – rely on advanced materials to make them lighter, stronger and more resistant to stress, heat and other harsh environmental conditions. Currently, the process for developing new materials to field in platforms frequently takes over a decade. These lengthy schedules often mean that developers of new platforms are forced to rely on decades-old, mature materials, because other potentially more advanced materials are still being tested and aren’t ready to be implemented into platform designs.
To address this problem, US military research agency DARPA has initiated a new program called Materials Development for Platforms (MDP). This aims to develop a methodology and toolset to compress the applied material development process by at least 75 percent: from an average of 10 years or more, to just two and a half years.
To achieve this goal, a cross-disciplinary model will incorporate materials science and engineering, Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) principles, and platform development disciplines of engineering, design, analysis and manufacturing. DARPA will focus on rapid development of materials with specific platform capabilities and intended missions in view – rather than supporting long-term, generalised materials development followed by assessments of potential applications for the resulting materials.
“In this program, we want to move from the current mindset of sporadic ‘pushes’ in materials technology development to a mindset that ‘pulls’ materials technology forward driven by platform design intent and mission need,” says Mick Maher, DARPA program manager. “Ideally, we could envision materials development happening on timescales more in line with modern commercial automobile development.”
The discovery 30 years ago of soccer-ball-shaped carbon molecules called buckyballs helped to spur an explosion of nanotechnology research. Now, there appears to be a new ball on the pitch.
Researchers from Brown University, Shanxi University and Tsinghua University in China have shown that a cluster of 40 boron atoms forms a hollow molecular cage similar to a carbon buckyball. It's the first experimental evidence that a boron cage structure—previously only a matter of speculation—does indeed exist.
"This is the first time that a boron cage has been observed experimentally," said Lai-Sheng Wang, a professor of chemistry at Brown who led the team that made the discovery. "As a chemist, finding new molecules and structures is always exciting. The fact that boron has the capacity to form this kind of structure is very interesting."
Wang and his colleagues describe the molecule, which they've dubbed borospherene, in the journal Nature Chemistry.
Carbon buckyballs are made of 60 carbon atoms arranged in pentagons and hexagons to form a sphere—like a soccer ball. Their discovery in 1985 was soon followed by discoveries of other hollow carbon structures including carbon nanotubes. Another famous carbon nanomaterial—a one-atom-thick sheet called graphene—followed shortly after.
After buckyballs, scientists wondered if other elements might form these odd hollow structures. One candidate was boron, carbon's neighbor on the periodic table. But because boron has one less electron than carbon, it can't form the same 60-atom structure found in the buckyball. The missing electrons would cause the cluster to collapse on itself. If a boron cage existed, it would have to have a different number of atoms.
Wang and his research group have been studying boron chemistry for years. In a paper published earlier this year, Wang and his colleagues showed that clusters of 36 boron atoms form one-atom-thick disks, which might be stitched together to form an analog to graphene, dubbed borophene. Wang's preliminary work suggested that there was also something special about boron clusters with 40 atoms. They seemed to be abnormally stable compared to other boron clusters. Figuring out what that 40-atom cluster actually looks like required a combination of experimental work and modeling using high-powered supercomputers.
Just in time for the World Cup final, researchers have succeeded in building the first “buckyballs” made entirely of boron atoms. Unlike true, carbon-based buckyballs, the boron molecules are not shaped exactly like footballs. But this novel form of boron might lead to new nanomaterials and could find uses in hydrogen storage.
Robert Curl, Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley found the first buckyball – or buckminsterfullerene – in 1985. The hollow cage, made of 60 carbon atoms arranged in pentagons and hexagons like a football, got its name from the American architect and engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller, who used the same shapes in designing his domes. The discovery opened the flood gates for creating more carbon structures with impressive qualities, such as carbon nanotubes and the single-atom thick graphene. Since then material scientists have also searched for buckyball-like structures made of other elements.
In 2007, Boris Yakobson, a material scientist at Rice University theorised that a cage made of 80 boron atoms should be stable. Another study published just last week predicts a stable structure with 36 boron atoms.
Publishing today in Nature Chemistry a team led by Lai-Sheng Wang, a chemist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has become the first to see such a beast – though it has a slightly different structure to the predictions. They called their 40-atom molecule borospherene. It is arranged in hexagons, heptagons and triangles.
“We predicted the possibility of B80 fullerene, and now, seven years after, it is remarkable to see experimental evidence,” says Yakobson. ”Especially as it is not what any of the theoretical calculations predicted.”
Wang’s team found the structure while looking for analogues of graphene made of boron. They found that clusters of 40 boron atoms seemed to be unusually stable, but they didn’t know what form these clusters were taking. Further calculations and experiments revealed that they had made two stable structures: one an almost flat molecule, the other a hollow, ball-like structure made of tesselated shapes, similar to the carbon buckyball.
In addition to having a less elegant shape, the borosphene balls form a different type of internal bond to their carbon counterparts. This makes them difficult to use as isolated building blocks as they have a tendency interact with each other, but this reactivity may make boron buckyballs good for connecting in chains. It also makes the balls capable of bonding with hydrogen, which the team says could make them useful in hydrogen storage.
Boron is not the first element after carbon to get buckyballed, but it may be the closest analogue to the carbon variety. Scientists have formed buckyball-like structures out of uranium-based and silicon-based compounds, mutli-walled boron nitride and molybdenum disulphide structures and smaller single-element cages of gold, tin and lead. But only boron seems to match the large hollow cage and symmetry of the original carbon buckyball, says Yakobson.
