HOW can you “oil” a nanomachine when conventional lubricants clog the miniature mechanisms?
Physicists at the Aichi University of Education and Seikei University in Japan have found a solution – using football-shaped carbon-60 molecules, or buckyballs, as tiny ball bearings.
The researchers placed a layer of buckyballs between two sheets of graphite, and will report in a future issue of Physical Review Letters that the sheets slipped over each other without any friction.
