Football-shaped molecules that focus on "amphiphilic" molecules could revolutionize the experience of the next World Cup, according to the new research carried out by Dr Martin Hollamby and Dr Takashi Nakanishi.
The researchers showed used neutron scattering techniques at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) to investigate the arrangement of these clusters and showed that hydrophobic amphiphiles could still assemble into extended structures in much the same way as conventional amphiphiles.
Hollamby asserted that changing the chemistry of the chains could even lead to gels made of bundled C60 wires that had a measureable conductivity by adding pristine C60 in place of the solvent, they instead prepared a sheet-like material with totally different properties.
Dr Isabelle Grillo, at the ILL said that the light elements that made up these 'molecular tadpoles' were easily located by neutrons moreover, small angle neutron scattering which they used at the ILL allowed to characterize the self-assembled systems from the nanometer scale to tenth of micrometers and was perfectly adapted to observe the coming together of the C60 footballs' into those beautiful core structures.