Re: [Sci.nanotech] Carbon Games



mike <mikespam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
So, i was musing on carbon tubes. Specifically
how to make a nice yard or more, single length tube.

I presume you mean a "single wall carbon nanotube".

How to coax the carbon to take our choice over its own?

I'm not clear what you mean by that.

In my head, almost fully outlined popped this:
A tiny chamber filled with carbon dioxide, kept active
via laser to stop it settling on the walls.

I'm not clear what you mean by that, either. A gas like CO2 doesn't
"settle on walls" at normal temperatures, at least not generally
speaking. (There are circumstances in which some CO2 could be adsorbed
into surfaces, of course, but that's clearly not what you have in mind
here.) I'm also not sure what "kept active via laser" would mean.

A silicon partition with six laser made perforations
(single carbon atom sized) in a hexagon pattern.

A carbon atom is order of magnitude the same size as a silicon
atom. To make a "perforation" this size in a silicon surface would
imply somehow removing individual silicon atoms with a laser. Since an
individual atom is on the order of 100pm (one angstrom) across, you
would need a laser with a wavelength on that order of that length. The
wavelength of visible light is on the order of 400-800nm, so as you
can readily see, a photon of the right wavelength is approximately
1/5,000,000th the wavelength of visible light, or off in the X-ray
part of the spectrum. Even ignoring all other problems, there aren't a
lot of good x-ray optics available to focus your x-rays (or more
likely given the energies we're talking about, your individual x-ray
photons.)

Of course, even if you could manage to aim the individual x-ray
photons, you would need to somehow get a silicon atom dislodged with
the use of said x-ray photons, and I'm not sure what mechanism would
manage that. (Laser ablation is not magical -- in bulk materials it
works essentially by heating, but this is not a bulk
material. Besides, it isn't clear you could even get the Si atoms to
reliably absorb the x-rays -- they'd likely pass through the surface
instead.)

Even assuming you could somehow remove single Si atoms by this utterly
impractical means, you could not drill a single atom wide hole through
an Si surface -- the Si atoms would just migrate and close your hole
up.

And a pressure control between the two, so that when
the holes are filled the difference encourages it to
progress through to the ordered side.

I have no idea what this means, or what relationship it might have to
your mention of CO2 gas or your "hexagonal pattern" "perforations".

I hypothesize that you somehow think that CO2 could somehow be forced
up to the magic holes you imagine you drill, the carbon atoms would
somehow magically detach from their bound oxygens, that following this
the carbon would somehow not instantly bond to the Si, and that
somehow by forcing streams of C atoms out the "other side" in a
hexagonal pattern they'd somehow magically form a "nanotube". (Why a
hexagonal pattern? Perhaps you've seen a sketch of a graphene *** in
a magazine and fixated on the hexagons.)

This idea is more or less as plausible as the notion that you could
make humans by forcing bits of homogenized cow through a short slot in
a piece of *** steel.

Perhaps my hypothesis on what you mean is wrong, but I can't think of
any mechanism by which a "hexagonal pattern" of "perforations" in some
Si is going to make you a SWCNT.

I guess this won't work like this, maybe the carbon
will behave better in a liquid mixture?

What do you imagine a "liquid mixture" of "carbon" means? Do you think
that somehow if you can make "carbon" into a "liquid" that it will
work better in your nano-scale pastry decorating tube?

(For reference, you can't actually make carbon into a liquid anyway --
at least, not at temperatures below 4000 kelvin and very high
pressures.)

Perhaps you imagine using liquid CO2 would be better for your purpose
than gaseous CO2 -- the answer is no, it won't. It makes no difference
what phase the cow homogenate is in when you throw it at a small slot
in some *** steel -- you still won't get a person extruded.

Anyhow, I'm still interested in why it won't work :-)
Fire away. :-)

It won't work because none of it makes any sense at all. It isn't even
a proposal -- it is a series of odd and not particularly plausible
ideas with no connection between them, none of which seem to have
anything to do with carbon nanotubes. I had to guess at what you were
talking about and even then it was completely implausible.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
(As an aside, I'm rather disappointed in the moderators for letting
"Mike"'s message through.

Perhaps the assumption is that since there are no postings these days,
absolutely anything, no matter how strange, should be
forwarded.

However, my suspicion is that no good content is posted precisely
because the bizarre content has driven serious people completely
away. (Were it not for the date on the original message, I would have
assumed it was an April 1st prank.)

Of course, it appears to be too late for sci.nanotech since the
content is now approximately one post of this last post's quality per
month, but perhaps a lesson can be drawn for other future fora.)


--
Perry E. Metzger perry@xxxxxxxxxxxx

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