It’s not the first single-molecule nano-motor, but it’s the first one to be driven by electricity: a Tufts research team has demonstrated that you can “provide electricity to a single molecule and get it to do something that’s not just random” (as team leader Charles Sykes put it).
Previous single-molecule nano-motors have been driven either by light or by chemicals, the researchers say.
Driving the molecular motor isn’t trivially easy, though. To achieve what they wanted, the researchers had to use the metal tip of a low-temperature scanning tunneling electron microscope to provide the charge to a butyl methyl sulfide molecule placed on a copper surface.
The scanning tunneling electron microscope can spin the atom on the copper surface. Source: Sykes Laboratory illustration.
Unsurprisingly, any practical application of the discovery is a long way away, but in the Tufts media release, Sykes imagined that it could be used to overcome the friction that takes place inside nano-tubes used (for example) in medical tests.
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The researchers had to drop the temperatures down to 5 degrees Kelvin, because at higher temperatures, the molecule spins too fast for measurement. Even at that temperature,
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