to make them easier to move around. Unfortunately, the handles add extra bonds to nanotubes, often distorting them and impairing the electrical and mechanical characteristics that make them desirable in many applications. A pair of physicists at MIT have found a class of molecules that attach to nanotubes without damaging them. Instead of simply grabbing onto the nanotubes, the molecules latch onto the tubes and break some bonds in the nanotube walls. As a result, the sum total of bonds is the same before and after the handle is attached, keeping the nanotube's original characteristics relatively intact. The researchers explain that the handles should make it easier to assemble novel nantube-based optical and chemical sensors.

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Quantum Behavior in a Classical World
Yves Couder and Emmanuel Fort
Physical Review Letters (forthcoming article, available to journalists on request)

Wave/particle duality is a quantum phenomenon usually confined to photons, electrons, protons, and other ultra-tiny objects. Quantum mechanics shows that such objects sometimes behave like particles, sometimes behave like waves, and sometimes like a little of both. All objects exhibit wave/particle duality to some extent, but the larger the object the harder it is to observe. Even individual molecules are often too large to show the quantum mechanical behavior. Now physicists at the Universit de Paris have demonstrated wave/particle duality with a droplet made of trillions of molecules. The experiment involved an oil droplet bouncing on the surface of an agitated layer of oil. The droplet created waves on the surface, which in turn affected the motion of the droplet. As a result, the droplet and waves formed a single entity that consisted of a hybrid of wave-like and particle-like characteristics. When the wave/droplet bounced its way through a slit, the waves allowed it to interfere with its own motion, much as a single photon can inter
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Contact: James Riordon
riordon@aps.org
301-209-3238
American Physical Society
5-Sep-2006

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