Out of all nano devices, nanotubesare among the most difficult to manufacture.
Such hollow tubes having diameters of only a few billionths of a meter, promise to be extremely useful, with applications ranging from delivering drugs within specific cells to fight cancer to desalinate seawater.
However, it is difficult to build nano structures and create a lot of them with the same traits, making a batch of several million nanotubes with identical diameters is even more complicated, and the challenge can not be avoided any longer because this kind of precision manufacturing is essential to create nanotechnologies of tomorrow.
Luckily, we may have a possible way to overcome the challenge.
The team of Ron Zuckermann, Nitash Balsara and Ken Downing, the Lawrence Berkeley (Berkeley Lab) National Laboratory, the United States Department of Energy, has found that when polymers of a class inspired by nature are placed in water, spontaneously they reconfigured to form crystalline nano tube holes.
More importantly, the nano tubes can be adjusted so that all have the same diameter of between 5 and 10 nano meters, depending on the length of the polymer chain.
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