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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

A company is starting to sell customized buckyballs [arstechnica.com] (endohedral fullerenes [wikipedia.org]) on the order of micrograms:

Designer Carbon Materials [designercarbon.com], 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 [nasa.gov] 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 [telegraph.co.uk]. "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 [epsrc.ac.uk] 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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