Laboratory equipment manufacturers may gain from ability to study micro-cables

The ability to study energy transport in cables one-millionth of the usual thickness could be good news for laboratory equipment manufacturers working with the latest conductive polymers.

Researchers at McGill University explain that studying the way energy moves across the conductive plastics can prove difficult due to the microscopic scales involved.

"We may easily study energy transport in a cable as thick as a hair," says lead researcher Dr Gonzalo Cosa of the McGill department of chemistry.

"But imagine studying this process in a single polymer molecule, whose thickness is one-millionth of that."

Now the team claims to have produced a way of doing this, allowing a single polymer strand to be visualised at a time.

They achieved this using electron and optical microscopes, discovering that energy transport is more effective when the polymers are coiled.

Other McGill research areas that could provide laboratory equipment manufacturers with new resources in the future include micro and nanoelectronics, biosystems and photonics.