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Semiconducting metal junction formed from two carbon nanotubes
A team led by Vincent Crespi at PennState used supercomputers to model the electronic states and total energies of various carbon molecules and discovered a tetrahedral carbon atom that creates tight and stable bonds to form tiny tubes only six atoms across -- the smallest diameter theoretically possible. Pictured here is a semiconducting metal junction formed from two carbon nanotubes.
[Research supported by U.S. National Science Foundation grant DMR 9520554.] (Year of image: 1996)
Credit: Vin Crespi, Pennsylvania State Physics (Distributed under Creative Commons license Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic)
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