Tiny, Tiny Gold Crown
By Ryan Kresse, Wisconsin
It’s huge. Wait, what’s more huge than huge? Massive. It’s massive, the largest one of it’s kind in the world. And it’s made entirely of gold. Pure gold. And it’s a ring. Well, it’s got more of a ring-ish, crown-y shape, but it is perfect. It’s a perfect ring made of pure gold. And, despite being the biggest of its kind, it’s so small you can’t see it. It’s even smaller than that. Even smaller. Nope, smaller. Keep going. Smaller. Smaller. Too small. Yep, there it is.A team of chemists from the Universities of Beijing, Nanjing, and Hong Kong have created the largest ever molecular ring system made of gold atoms held together by metal-metal bonds. The massive-yet-insanely-tiny gold crown is made of 36 gold atoms and is only a few nanometres across. The research team also held the previous record for a molecular gold ring system at 16 atoms big.
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The massive-yet-tiny gold crown
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To make their gold rings, the Chinese researchers start with a very small ring of six gold atoms, formed from a kind of double triangle structure. The six-atom structures then assemble themselves to form the 36-atom gold ring. Obviously this is a oversimplification – the actual chemistry is both mind-bogglingly cool and mind-bogglingly mind-boggling.
Researchers in other fields have been experimenting with gold nanoparticles, which can be used to detect heavy metals such as mercury and lead and microscopic cancer tumors. Gold nanoparticles might even be used in the future as a treatment for cancer.
But what do you do with a 36-atom gold ring, even if it is the biggest of its kind? It’s not exactly one ring to rule them all. And you wouldn't buy it for your would-be fiancée. She’d scream in horror as you got down on one knee and presented her with a seemingly empty box. And what would the diamond be? A buckyball, probably. They're both carbon. Still… not worth it. At our scale, get something we can see.
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Image: w
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