Tiny crystal flower blooms in a furnace

Douglas Heaven, reporter

(Image: Chun Li, Liang Huang, Gayatri Pongur Snigdha and Linyou Cao, North Carolina State University)

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but it's unlikely to be this small. This beautifully intricate flower-like structure has petals only 20 to 30 nanometres thick - making the world's smallest orchid look like a triffid.

Linyou Cao at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and colleagues made it out of germanium sulphide dust. They weren't interested in nanohorticulture so much as finding a way to boost the capacity of the next generation of energy storage devices, such as lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors. Germanium sulphide is a semiconductor material, and the tiny crystalline bloom's promise is due to its relatively enormous surface area packed into a tiny space. The material is also good at absorbing sunlight and converting it into usable power, making this little flower a potential solar cell.

The team synthesised it by vaporising germanium sulphide powder in a furnace and then cooling the vapour in a controlled way so that it settled in thin petal-like layers that branched out from one another. They also found that the nanosheets grew at a speedy 3 to 5 micrometres a minute, an order of magnitude faster than comparable nanosheets or nanowires.

Journal reference: ACS Nano, DOI: 10.1021/nn303745e

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/24681306/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C10A0Ctiny0Ecrystal0Eflower0Eblooms0Ein0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

supercross christina aguilera etta james funeral sundance film festival victoria azarenka the flintstones etta james ufc on fox