Oxford scientists have made it into the Guinness Book of World Records by making the world’s smallest test tube – so tiny that around 300 billion would fit onto a full stop on this page. As well as having entered the record books, the team’s discoveries have exciting implications for the manufacture of materials.
In a paper published in Chemical Communications, David Britz and his colleagues at Oxford and Nottingham Universities describe how they performed chemical reactions inside carbon nanotubes, hollow cylinders with nanoscale diameters. These nanotubes will appear in the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest ever test tubes.
The nanotube served as a confining environment for the researchers to initiate reactions between the molecules inside it and then directly observe the resulting material using an electron microscope. It also allowed them to improve the way the molecules connected to each other. Without the tiny test tube, the molecules made up a twisted, branched polymer – but the tube seemed to have an ordering effect, forcing them into a linear chain.
The nanotube has an inner diameter of approximately 1.2 nanometres, and a length of about 2 micrometers. Its volume is two zeptolitres (a zeptolitre is 10-21 litres), and around 2,000 molecules react in that space.