Just out of interest, is it possible to get total interal reflection on the inside of nanotubes? Nanotubes are pretty much like rolled up sheets of graphite, so I would have thought that the layer of free electrons on the inside of the tube might allow TIR to occur.
If so, that would make nanotubes really good optical fibres - if long enough ones could be manafactured.
-Oli
Nope, not gonna happen. Nano tubes are much smaller diameter than the wavelength of any light that you might reasonable want to use for data transmission.
You simply couldn’t get light to fit into the end of the tube.
Visible light will not pass though a hole smaller than 350 to 700 nm (depending on frequency). Carbon nanotubes are just a couple nanometers across. About 100 times too small to pass visible light through.
In theory though, isn’t the buckytube molecule structure scaleable? Couldn’t someone grow a buckytube that was big enough to transmit light?
In theory I suppose they could.
Buckytubes, today, are in the neighborhood of 30 atoms around.
To get to the required size, we would have to build tubes in the neighborhood of 3000 atoms around, at least. 10 or 15,000 would be more reasonable.
Its pretty difficult to foresee the pace of future technological development, but… I still think it’ll be a good while before I could pull off this one.
Just FMI… what exactly are nanotubes and buckytubes?
They are pure carbon tubes. These are atomic scale tubes and pretty unique. They are unbelievable strong and hint at new vistas in material science.
If we can figure out how to make them at lengths even as long as a centimeter (and in bulk), it may be possible to fashion string or cable from them that would be orders of magnitude stronger than current materials.
Think along the lines of picking up a car with fishing line or even thread size cables. If they are perfected and made cheaply, they could revolutionize composite construction.
They are closely related to another fairly recent carbon molecule discovery. This would be “buckyballs”. These are hollow pure carbon balls that are “soccer ball” like. Very tiny little things that generally have room for just an atom or two in their interiors.
A buckyball is an arrangement of carbon atoms that resembles a soccer ball in it’s shape. A nanotube is a tube made up carbon atoms. Buckyballs are named in honor of R. Buckminster Fuller who designed the geodesic dome, which looks like a giant buckyball.
Nanotubes are indeed scalable and there’s considerable research being undertaken to find economical methods of mass-producing them. One of the groups trying to develop large scale, cheaply produced nanotubes hopes to use them to construct a space elevator.
Damn, scotth beat me to it, but let me add that buckyballs can be scaled up as well (though they look less like a soccer ball and more like the Epcot Sphere as they get larger).
Just FMI… what exactly are nanotubes and buckytubes?
Should we post all that again, S.f.t.D?
Most likely because the Epcot Sphere was designed using Buckminster Fuller’s principles. In fact, the proper name of the structure “Spaceship Earth” is taken from a quote of Mr. Fuller’s.
Also the shape of a buckyball molecule depends on both the number of carbon atoms and how they bond together. If the number of 5-carbon rings is kept at 12, with the rest of the structure made up of 6-carbon rings, then the shape of the buckyball begins to aproximate an icosohedron as more carbon atoms are added.