The knot is composed of 54 atoms, chained together and ensnared in a trefoil, the simplest nontrivial knot. The knot has no loose end; it is a continuous loop, passing through itself in mesmerizing arcs. The team's work describing the self-assembled "metallaknot" was published in Nature Communications.
It is made up of gold, carbon, and phosphorus, as reported by New Scientist. The knot is formulaically described as [Au6{1,2-C6H4(OCH2CC)2}3{Ph2P(CH2)4PPh2}3], or Au6 for short, in reference to the six gold atoms in the knot.
You may wonder how a team determines the tightness of a knot at the molecular scale. As the researchers state in their paper, the knots are "classified according to the minimum number of crossings when the reduced form of the structure is projected onto a two-dimensional surface."
In 2017, a team of researchers crafted a knot with 24 atoms per crossing, which made it into the Guinness Book. In 2020, a different team managed to produce a 69-atom-long knot with a backbone crossing ratio (or BCR) of 23, making it the record holder. The smaller the BCR, the tighter the knot.
The newest—and indeed, smallest and tightest knot—beats the 2020 record. The new knot is just 54 atoms long, and has a remarkably low BCR of just 18. It is tighter than the BCR of the tightest organic trefoil knots by a BCR margin of 7.3.
Journal Reference:
DOI: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrev.0c00321
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2024, @08:25PM (1 child)
Glad to hear that someone is still working on knotty problems...and not just watching vids on their phones.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday January 27 2024, @03:55AM
Instead of an xkcd, I leave a Veritassium...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8DBhTXM_Br4 [youtube.com]
There is also much interest in biochemistry/DNA, and how the machinery of life works. Folding @ Home, anyone? Assembling the parts that make us run.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jPhvic-eqbc [youtube.com]
It's our destiny to learn as much as we can how stuff works. We enjoy a much higher standard of living asd far more creature comforts by understanding how to control energy and our environment.
The knots are particularly interesting as once assembled, there are no loose ends, which implies a stable assemblage.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2, Funny) by turgid on Friday January 26 2024, @10:03PM
Isn't that the Sunday Sport of science news? And chemists? Goodness me, did they get lost on the way to the physics lecture? They'll be turning into biologists or sociologists next.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].