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link

Quantum dots (QD) and quantum wires (QWR) are semiconductor or metal structures that confine electrons and (or) holes in a potential box having a dimension of few tens of nanometers. Due to quantum effects these nanostructures have exceptional optical and transport properties, which makes them ideal for both fundamental research and technological applications. The nanotechnology projects below describe the focus of our research during 2002.

Applications like getting solar electricity from the desert to my toaster.

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http://www.smalltimes.org/document_disp ... nt_id=6661

Such quantum wires could have the electrical conductivity of copper, but at a sixth of the weight. Unlike today’s transmission cables, they wouldn’t sag dangerously into trees because of the nanotubes’ tensile strength. Places once too remote for power plants could become reachable, adding to the grid’s capacity. Energy also could be harvested from sources such as solar farms built in deserts around the world.

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http://www.americanenergyindependence.c ... lenge.html

[quote]The other critical innovation needed is massive electrical power transmission over continental distances, permitting, for example, hundreds of gigawatts of electrical power to be transported from solar farms in New Mexico to markets in New England. Then all primary power producers can compete with little concern for the actual distance to market. Clean coal plants in Wyoming, stranded gas in Alaska, wind farms in North Dakota, hydroelectric power from northern British Columbia, biomass energy from Mississippi, nuclear power from Hanford Washington, and solar power from the vast western deserts, etc., remote power plants from all over the continent contribute power to consumers thousands of miles away on the grid. Everybody plays. Nanotechnology in the form of single-walled carbon nanotubes (a.k.a. “buckytubesâ€

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http://www.house.gov/science/hearings/e ... malley.htm

These single walled carbon nanotubes are uniquely specified by two small integers, n and m. The diameter is roughly proportional to the sum, n+m. The electronic properties, however, are determined by the difference, n-m. If n and m are the same, then n-m=0 and the tube conducts electrons like a perfect metal. In the trade it is called and "arm-chair" tube. Electrons move down this tube as a coherent quantum particle, traveling down the tube much like a photon of light travels down a single mode optic fiber. Individual armchair tubes can conduct as much as 20 microamps of current. This doesn't sound like much until you realize that his little molecular wire is only 1 nanometer in diameter. A half inch thick cable made of these tubes aligned parallel to each other along the cable, would have over 100 trillion conductors packed side-by-side like pipes in a hardware store. If each of these tubes carried only one microamp, only 2 percent of its capacity, the half inch thick cable would be carrying one hundred millions amps of current. Fabricating such a cable - we call it the "armchair quantum wire" - is a prime objective of our work.

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ibid.

When we succeed, the impact on energy technologies may be immense. Running the cloning reactor with arm-chair seeds we should be able to make pounds of all arm-chair buckytubes. Using a process we have been developing for the past few years with support from the Office of Naval Research, we expect to be able to spin these nanotubes into continuous fibers. This process resembles the spinning of Kevlar. But here instead of forming a strong electrical insulator like Kevlar, the all-armchair buckytube fiber will be an electrical conductor. We expect the conductivity to be extremely high, both because of the quantum light-pipe behavior of electrons traveling down individual arm chair buckytubes, and because of facile resonant quantum tunneling of the electron from tube to tube. To get a feeling for this bizarre quantum behavior, imagine you are traveling on a subway train in New York City late at night. You're sleepy and for a moment you nod off. But there is another exactly identical train running parallel to you and when you wake up you are on this other train. So it is when electrons quantum tunnel from tube to tube in these arm-chair quantum wires. Welcome to the amazing world of nanotechnology!

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http://www.cnanotech.com/

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http://superconductors.org/roomnano.htm

Professor Guo-Meng (Peter) Zhao claims that there exist more than 20 markers in carbon nanotubes which demand they once-and-for-all take their rightful place on the throne of room-temperature superconductivity. But, if they are indeed RTSC's, why hasn't the scientific community signed-off on them? And, why isn't the private sector clamoring to install them in our cell phones and computers and everything else that could benefit from such a miracle discovery? We wanted to know, too. So we asked Dr. Zhao some pointed questions about his claim. And here's what he had to say.