Stretched carbyne provides mechanical activation

Stretching carbyne - a hard-to-make, one-dimensional chain of carbon atoms - by three per cent can begin to change its properties in ways that engineers might find useful for mechanically activated nanoscale electronics and optics.

The finding by Rice theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues appears in Nano Letters.

What we realised here is that you can use tension to dynamically go from one regime to the other, which makes it useful on a completely different level

According to the University, carbyne has until recently existed mostly in theory, though experimentalists have made some headway in creating small samples of the material. The carbon chain would theoretically be the strongest material ever if it could be made reliably.

The first-principle calculations by Yakobson and his co-authors, Rice postdoctoral researcher Vasilii Artyukhov and graduate student Mingjie Liu, show that stretching carbon chains activates the transition from conductor to insulator by widening the material’s band gap.