THE beauty and unique properties of crystals are all down to their rigidly
uniform structure, identical units repeated millions upon millions of times in a
regular 3D pattern. To get a closer look, researchers have grown, for the first
time, what is in effect a one-dimensional crystal—a string of units inside
the world’s smallest test tube.
The crystals, lines of repeating units just two or three atoms wide, were
formed inside carbon nanotubes—minuscule honeycomb sheets of carbon atoms
rolled into tubes. “Very, very small crystals can’t exist without our help,”
says Malcolm Green of Oxford University. “To get…
