WORLD
Scientists find ‘Olympic’ molecule
Baku, May 31 (AZERTAC). It's the smallest logo ever created - a single molecule 00,000 times thinner than a human hair, precision-crafted to resemble the five Olympic rings.
The molecule was purposely 'designed' by the Royal Society of Chemistry and IBM - and is called Olympicene.
It's an astonishing demonstration of how precisely synthetic chemistry can be controlled - made in a laboratory after a scientist doodled the logo and wondered if it could be created at the atomic scale
Experts from the RSC, the University of Warwick and IBM Research - Zurich, decided to make and visualise olympicene, whose five-ringed structure was entered on a chemical database of over 26 million records.
Chemists Dr David Fox and Anish Mistry, from the university, then used some clever synthetic organic chemistry - the modern molecule designer's toolbox - to build olympicene.
Dr Fox said: ‘Alongside the scientific challenge involved in creating olympicene in a laboratory, there's some serious practical reasons for working with molecules like this.
‘The compound is related to single-layer graphite, also known as graphene, and is one of a number of related compounds which potentially have interesting electronic and optical properties.
‘These types of molecules may offer great potential for the next generation of solar cells and high-tech lighting sources such as LEDs.
A first glimpse of the molecule's structure was obtained at Warwick Uni using scanning tunnelling microscopy. A higher resolution technique was however needed to unravel its atomic-level anatomy.
The chemical structure of olympicene was analysed with unprecedented resolution using a complex technique known as noncontact atomic force microscopy.
Using the technique, IBM scientists imaged a single olympicene molecule just 1.2 nanometres in width - about 100,000 times thinner than a human hair.