World’s smallest electric wire developed, 4 atoms wide

Computational simulation of wires, showing electron density as electrons flow Image Credit

A team of researchers have developed a method for constructing the smallest electric wires known to exist – they’re just 4 atoms wide, and reside inside a silicon chip. The wire itself is 20 times thinner than the copper wire that’s currently inside most microprocessors.

These wires aren’t made from copper, either. They’re composed of phosphorous atoms which are inserted, atom by atom, a into the silicon crystal of the chip itself.  This is an advantage over traditional etching because the phosphorous wires are encased in the silicon, meaning that the electrons don’t have any nearby surfaces to latch onto. This maintains a low resistance to the current, meaning that the electrons create much less heat than do nanoscale copper wires, which produce higher resistance on the nanoscale.

The ultra-thin electric wire is 10,000 times thinner than human hair, or around 20 times smaller than the copper wire inside a microprocessor. The world’s thinnest electric wire in silicon was developed by a group of researchers from the University of New South Wales, Melbourne University and Purdue University.

“It’s extraordinary to show that Ohm’s Law, such a basic law, still holds even when constructing a wire from the fundamental building blocks of nature – atoms,” Bent Weber, the paper’s lead author whose report was published in journal Science.

Weber, who was a graduate student Center of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales, noted that he was thrilled with the project.

Experiments reportedly revealed that the nano-thin wire has the same electric power and efficiency with the conventional electric wires, despite its size; but could be cheaper since they are made atom by atom instead of material-stripping.

“Typically we chip or etch material away, which can be very expensive, difficult and inaccurate,” Gerhard Klimeck, director of a Purdue University‘s Network for Computational Nanotechnology, said on the report.

“But this experimental group built devices by placing atomically thin layers of phosphorus in silicon and found that with densely doped phosphorus wires just four atoms wide it acts like a wire that conducts just as well as metal.” Klimeck added, who is also part of the study.

The researchers hope that these wires can help in quantum computing, when one-atom transistors are eventually created. This recent discovery is being expected to play a vital role in the future of ‘quantum computing‘, in which computer scientists and physicists can benefit a lot in the development of future quantum computers.