Nanofibers Perform Attoscale Chemistry
The chemical reactors allow experiments to be performed using just thousands of molecules.
This illustration shows how the polymer nanofibers perform a reaction. The fibers are 200 nanometers in diameter and do not normally react with one another. However, when the fibers are exposed to a flash of heat (shown bottom), the polymers melt together, causing the formation of an “attoreactor,” where the two reactants meet each other.
Credit: Pavel Anzenbacher and Manuel Palacios
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