Nanoscopic Self-Assembling Wiring Fits Together Like LEGO

Scientists from Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have teamed up to develop a process for developing super-thin electrical wiring with no loss of conductivity that can self-assemble and fit together in much the same way as construction toy LEGO. The technology uses diamondoids – which is the smallest state in which diamonds can exist – to create wires just three atoms wide, which could be used to weave electric-conducting fabrics, a new paper published in Nature Materials has revealed.

“What we have shown here is that we can make tiny, conductive wires of the smallest possible size that essentially assemble themselves,” Hao Yan, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford and lead author of the paper, told Phys.org. “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.”

“Much like LEGO blocks, they only fit together in certain ways that are determined by their size and shape,” Stanford graduate student Fei Hua Li, who worked on the project, added. “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.”

The research is set to lead to significant innovation in the creation of new conductive materials as well as increasing the efficiency of electrical devices with its lossless qualities.

“You can imagine weaving those into fabrics to generate energy,” study co-author Nicholas Melosh said. “This method gives us a versatile toolkit where we can tinker with a number of ingredients and experimental conditions to create new materials with finely tuned electronic properties and interesting physics.”