Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Carbon Nanotube Trefoil Knot (CNTTK)

Carbon Trefoil knot? Is it possible to have a carbon nanotube curved like a trefoil knot or even bizarrer like a torus knot (CNTTK)?
Chuang has discovered a systamatic scheme to generate correct structures for a large family of CNTTR in his Ms thesis recently. Preliminary semi-empirical calculations based on AM1 show that these molecules could be quite stable. Of course, this doesn't mean it is straightforward to synthesize them.
In the following figure, I show the smallest stable carbon trefoil knot together with the famous woodcut of trefoil knot by Escher.
I believe that this kind of carbon torus knot have never been mentioned before, let along the efforts to find out the correct arrangement of nonhexagons on the tubule surface.

No comments: