Researchers have figured out how to produce ultra-thin nano-threads for the first time ever that exhibit extraordinary properties, like strength and stiffness greater than the strongest nano-tubes and polymers available today.

"From a fundamental-science point of view, our discovery is intriguing because the threads we formed have a structure that has never been seen before," John Badding, professor of chemistry at Penn State said, according to a press release issued by the university. The core of the nanothreads that Badding's team made is a long, thin strand of carbon atoms arranged just like the fundamental unit of a diamond's structure - zig-zag "cyclohexane" rings of six carbon atoms bound together, in which each carbon is surrounded by others in the strong triangular-pyramid shape of a tetrahedron."

"It is as if an incredible jeweler has strung together the smallest possible diamonds into a long miniature necklace," Badding said. "Because this thread is diamond at heart, we expect that it will prove to be extraordinarily stiff, extraordinarily strong, and extraordinarily useful," Badding added.

From a fundamental-science point of view, the researcher's discovery is interesting since the threads they formed have a structure that has never been seen before, Badding said. The core of the nanothreads that the team made is a long, thin strand of carbon atoms arranged like the fundamental unit of a diamond's structure, zig-zag "cyclohexane" rings of six carbon atoms bound together, in which each carbon is surrounded by others in the strong triangular-pyramid shape of a tetrahedron.

"It is as if an incredible jeweler has strung together the smallest possible diamonds into a long miniature necklace," Badding said. "Because this thread is diamond at heart, we expect that it will prove to be extraordinarily stiff, extraordinarily strong, and extraordinarily useful."

The discovery comes after almost a century of unsuccessful attempts by other labs which tried to compress separate carbon-containing molecules like liquid benzene into an ordered nanomaterial.

"We used the large high-pressure Paris-Edinburgh device at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to compress a 6-millimeter-wide amount of benzene - a gigantic amount compared with previous experiments," said Malcolm Guthrie of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a coauthor of the research paper, according to the release. "We discovered that slowly releasing the pressure after sufficient compression at normal room temperature gave the carbon atoms the time they needed to react with each other and to link up in a highly ordered chain of single-file carbon tetrahedrons, forming these diamond-core nanothreads."

Badding and his colleagues are the first to coax molecules containing carbon atoms to form the strong tetrahedron shape, then link each tetrahedron end to end to form a long, thin nanothread.

He said the thread's width was phenomenally small, just a few atoms across, hundreds of thousands of times smaller than an optical fiber, enormously thinner that an average human hair.

"Theory by our co-author Vin Crespi suggests that this is potentially the strongest, stiffest material possible, while also being light in weight," he said.

The molecule the researchers compressed is benzene, a flat ring which contains six carbon atoms and six hydrogen atoms. The resulting diamond-core nanothread is surrounded by a halo of hydrogen atoms, according to the release.

The scientists said that during the compression process, the flat benzene molecules stack together, bend, and break apart. While the researchers released the pressure, the atoms reconnected in an entirely different way.

This resulted in a structure that has carbon in the tetrahedral configuration of diamond with hydrogens hanging out to the side and each tetrahedron bonded with another to form a long, thin, nanothread.

"It really is surprising that this kind of organization happens," Badding said. "That the atoms of the benzene molecules link themselves together at room temperature to make a thread is shocking to chemists and physicists. Considering earlier experiments, we think that, when the benzene molecule breaks under very high pressure, its atoms want to grab onto something else but they can't move around because the pressure removes all the space between them. This benzene then becomes highly reactive so that, when we release the pressure very slowly, an orderly polymerization reaction happens that forms the diamond-core nanothread."

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