What are sp-Carbon wires?
Carbon materials, in many different forms from graphite to synthetic diamond and Carbon Fiber Composites (CFC), play a leading role in many technology and engineering fields. In the last 30 years the discovery and advent of nanostructures such as fullerenes, nanotubes and graphene with appealing properties has pushed further the opportunities opening to nanotechnology applications. Carbon-atom wires, based on sp-hybridization, are the ultimate 1-dimensional carbon nanostructures (1-atom diameter) with functional properties strongly dependent on the wire length and termination. The design and control of the wire structure opens the way to build materials with tunable properties, which is at present a largely unexplored topic.