THE MAKING OF "NANOBUCKY"

Nanobucky is a fun example of the ability to control the synthesis of nanoscale materials such as carbon nanofibers. Nanobucky is made entirely from tiny "hairs" of carbon nanofibers. These carbon nanofibers are about 50-75 nanometers in diameter, each about 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. The entire image of Bucky is about 15 microns (15,000 nm) in size. That means that we could fit approximately 9,000 complete NanoBuckys onto the head of a pin. NanoBucky was created by graduate students Sarah Baker, Kiu-Yuen Tse and Jeremy Streifer, postdoc Matthew Marcus, and Prof. Robert Hamers, at UW-Madison.

The carbon nanofibers that make up Bucky are of great interest for practical applications such as chemical and biological sensing and as high surface-area materials for use in a applications such as energy storage. So, while NanoBucky is fun, there is some serious science behind making structures such as this. Below you'll find a link to the description of how Bucky was made.

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