[snip] This work is at a very early development stage, and it's all about post-nucleation," Yakobson said. "Nucleation sets what I think of as the genetic code - very primitive compared to biology - that determines the chirality and the speed of growth of a nanotube." He said it may be possible someday to dictate the form of a nanotube as it begins to bubble up from a catalyst, "but it will take a lot of ingenuity." [/snip] http://www.google.com/search?q=froarty+nanotube+cornell&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8&rlz=
Interesting new way to put it - where Peng Chen at Cornell discovered catalytic action only occurs at breaks in nanotube geometry http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/April09/nanotubeCatalysts.ws.html this new article says catalytic forces construct the nanotube... changes in geometry don't occur in a tube shape so the articles taken together seem to reinforce that this geometry is just nature selecting for a path of lower resistance where attraction forces are eliminated or cancel. It also reinforces why strong catalysts are typically difficult to construct, 2 step procedures where nature would otherwise reduce or eliminate their potency via stiction [leaching of alloys to create skeletal cats] - It leads me to reiterate these geometries are probably forming and self destructing all around us all the time on such a tiny spatial and temporal scale we never even detect them but should be what we target in our methodology to create and maintain new super catalysts [leaching or milling in an inert heat sunk environment]. Fran
