![]() ![]() So Decurtins got in touch with Gábor Domokos, the study’s first author, a mathematician at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Forecasting self-assembly is a job for supercomputers, and the heavyweight programs required can take days or weeks to run. That’s because nature has not been especially forthcoming with her molecular design philosophy. ![]() Predicting how molecules self-assemble into 2D sheets is one of the grand challenges of materials science, said Johannes Barth, a physicist at the Technical University of Munich. So many scientists, including Decurtins and his colleagues, want to design materials that assemble themselves. It’s possible to build these 2D materials atom by atom, but doing so is expensive, difficult and time-consuming. And patterns that contain metal ions can be powerful catalysts. ![]() These 2D materials can have peculiar and practical properties that depend on how their molecular building blocks are arranged.įor example, it’s possible to arrange molecules into 2D patterns that use electrons as computational bits or to store data. “It’s just a matter of scale.”ĭecurtins’ patterns weren’t formed by cracks in the earth, but by molecules: they were mosaic-like tilings of molecules in sheets just one molecule thick. Decurtins, a chemist at the University of Bern, was reminded of the materials he had been studying. It wasn’t the unusual title that caught his eye, but the pictures on the third page - geological patterns at every scale from cracked permafrost to Earth’s tectonic plates. On a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 2021, Silvio Decurtins was leafing through a paper with a title that could have been pulled from a comic book for mathematically inclined teens: “Plato’s Cube and the Natural Geometry of Fragmentation.” ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |