| Title | Company Sells Endohedral Fullerenes (Buckyballs) for $167 Million per Gram | |
| Date | Sunday December 13 2015, @08:44AM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| from the 108-kg-would-pay-off-US-national-debt dept. | ||
A company is starting to sell customized buckyballs (endohedral fullerenes) on the order of micrograms:
Designer Carbon Materials, an Oxford-based scientific startup, has recently sold its first 200 micrograms of nitrogen atom-based endohedral fullerenes for £22,000 ($33,400)—or about £110 million ($167 million) per gram. This valuation likely makes the material the second most valuable on Earth, preceded only by antimatter, which is estimated by NASA to cost some £41 trillion per gram.
The material, which essentially is a cage of carbon atoms with a nitrogen atom inside, could be used for very small and very accurate atomic clocks, which are currently of the size of a room. "Imagine a minaturised atomic clock that you could carry around in your smartphone," the company's founder Dr. Kyriakos Porfyrakis told The Telegraph. "This is the next revolution for mobile."
[...] These caged molecules have greatly enhanced physical and electronic properties compared to "normal" ones. In case of N@C60 (i.e. nitrogen atom-based endofullerenes), the "super power" is a long electron spin lifetime.
The research of one of the most expensive materials on Earth hasn't been cheap, either. In 2013, Oxford University together with two partners received a £1.5 million research grant to develop manufacturing methods "for increasing the production of endohedral fullerenes to the gram scale."
[...] At the moment, Designer Carbon Materials can produce "up to half a gram a day" of cheaper and lower-purity material, which means that there will be more empty carbon cages than those with a nitrogen atom inside. "As for the higher-purity material, we can make 50 milligrams of it, and that would take us weeks to purify," said Porfyrakis.
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