Scientists have now made a Möbius strip out of a tiny carbon nanobelt. Carbon is famous for forming tiny, complex nanostructures from cylindrical nanotubes to hollow spheres known as buckyballs. Adding a new geometry to the list, scientists have made a twisted strip called a Möbius carbon nanobelt.
What are Mobius strips?
Möbius strips are twisted bands that are famous in mathematics for their weird properties. A rubber band, for example, has an inside and an outside. But if you cut the rubber band crosswise, twist one end and glue it back together, you get a Möbius strip, which has only one face.
How can be Mobius Strip made out of tiny carbon nanobelt?
As the nanobelts are rolled out into a strip, the twist in them becomes more pronounced. The narrower area that remains on each side of the tube is twisted like a rubber band, resulting in structures with very high aspect ratios.
What does Möbius Strip look like?
The three-dimensional shape can be made with several nanobelts joined together (or “rolled out” as they are called). A single nanobelt has an inner and outer diameter of 1.5 nanometers – equal to one-hundredth of a human hair width.
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The latest history of creating carbon nanobelts
Researchers in 2017 created carbon nanobelts, which were thin loops of carbon that are like tiny slices of a carbon nanotube. It suggested that it might be possible to create a nanobelt with a twist, a Möbius carbon nanobelt. in order to make the itsy-bitsy twisty carbon, some of the same researchers stitched together individual smaller molecules using a series of 14 chemical reactions, chemist Yasutomo Segawa of the Institute for Molecular Science in Okazaki, Japan, and colleagues report May 19 in Nature Synthesis.
The implication of the finding
Although carbon nanotubes can be used to make new types of computer chips and added to textiles to create fabric with unusual properties, scientists don’t yet know of any practical applications for twisty nanobelts. However, Segawa says, the work improves scientists’ ability to make tiny carbon structures, especially complicated ones.
So, the twist in tiny carbon nanobelt is like a piece of rubber, which has an inside and an outside. And Möbius strip is like a one-sided band; it has only a single edge. The bending of the arms and legs of a rubber band, after twisting it, is almost circular. This feature was obviously a great inspiration to create Mobius strip out of carbon nanobelt of their soft structure.
