Electron beam creates ridiculously thin nanowires

statecolumn.com ^ | April 28, 2014

[BenLurkin]

What’s the thinnest wire you can imagine? As thin as a human hair? Half that thickness? Try again. Using a narrowly focused beam of electrons, researchers at at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have created metallic wires that are just three atoms wide. That’s 1/1,000 of the width of wires typically found in modern circuits, themselves microscopic.

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Combining the metals molybdenum or tungsten with either sulfur or selenium results in materials known as transition-metal dichalcogenides, or TMDCs. TMDCs are a family of semiconducting materials that naturally form monolayers. Junhao used a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) that is capable of focusing a beam of electrons down to a width of half an angstrom

[Paladin2]

I’m thinking that it would be difficult to construct a thread with less than a atom of width, but all of this new fangled quark stuff makes normal human conception of possibilities moot.

[2ndDivisionVet]

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[PapaNew]

Imagine, for instance display screens so thin they could be rolled up and transported in a briefcase or pocket.

[Sherman Logan]

Given our present understanding of physics, it is impossible. Unless you’re dealing with an element rather than a compound, the thread would have to be a molecule rather than an atom wide.

A staple of science fiction for decades has been the “mono-molecular blade,” the edge of which is only a single molecule, the sharpest possible edge.

If we’re making things directly out of sub-molecular particles, we’re moving to a whole new level of manipulation of matter.