Carbon monoxide, a pollutant and a poison, is diamond in the rough to researchers at Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc. In the company's Houston laboratories, the gas hisses along at high pressure into a hot aluminum-walled reactor, where it encounters a pinch of iron-based catalyst. As the CO molecules rip apart, the metal coaxes carbon atoms to join into hexagons, which fit together into sheets that finally roll into seamless cylinders called carbon nanotubes. They can contain millions of atoms and stretch almost as wide as the period at the end of this sentence, yet they remain single molecules.
And what a molecule. "A carbon nanotube is the most beautiful molecule there is," says physicist Cees Dekker of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He's not just talking about the perfectly rolled atomic matrix, unlike anything else in nature. He is smitten by the nanotubes' unique properties: Stronger than steel, they absorb radio waves and can emulate both copper and silicon. Dekker and several colleagues are learning how to manhandle these tubular molecules into fundamentally new kinds of electronic components. If their efforts pay off, the result could well be a technological leap that makes today's PCs look as quaint as mechanical adding machines.
