Ancient Greek hairdressers could teach us a thing or two about nanotechnology.
When hair is dyed using a lead-based dye popular 2000 years ago, crystals of lead sulphide just 5 nanometres across form within the microstructure of the hair fibres, according to a team led by Phillipe Walter at the French Museums’ Research and Restoration Centre in Paris.
A hair-like scaffold could be used to grow “quantum dots” – tiny crystals which confine a handful of electrons in a way that makes it possible to exploit their quantum properties, such as spin, for use in emerging quantum computing systems. Existing…
