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Chemists demonstrate assembly of new molecular structures
Researchers at Indiana University (IU) study the ability of small molecules to organize themselves into patterns on surfaces, which may open opportunities for new types of materials. This image shows a star-shaped molecule, called "cyanostar," on the surface of graphite. The colored surface texture is experimental data from a scanning tunneling microscope, which uses a sharp metal tip (illustrated in the upper left) to probe the surface so that researchers can form an image of the surface with molecular resolution. The data was converted to 3-D isosurfaces using MeshLab-Visual Computing Lab and Autodesk Maya and Adobe Photoshop were used to render the final image.
This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
To learn more about this research, see the IU news story . (Date of Image: July 2014)
Credit: Albert William, Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing at IUPUI
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