A sheet made from nan­otubes, tiny car­bon tubes only a few times big­ger than atoms with remark­able strength and elec­tronic prop­er­ties. In today’s edi­tion of the jour­nal Sci­ence, how­ever, sci­en­tists from the Uni­ver­sity of Texas and Australia’s Com­mon­wealth Sci­en­tific and Indus­trial Research Orga­ni­za­tion report the cre­ation of industry-ready sheets of mate­ri­als made from nan­otubes. Nan­otubes are tiny car­bon tubes with remark­able strength that are only a few times wider than atoms. They can also act as the semi­con­duc­tors found in mod­ern electronics.

Sci­ence
The same sheet, emit­ting polar­ized light after the volt­age is applied through incan­des­cent heating.

“This is fun­da­men­tally a new mate­r­ial,” says team leader Ray Baugh­man of the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Dal­las in Richardson.

• Self-supporting, trans­par­ent and stronger than steel or high-strength plas­tics, the sheets are flex­i­ble and can be heated to emit light.

• A square mile of the thinnest sheets, about 2-millionths-of-an-inch thick, would weigh only about 170 pounds.

• In lab tests, the sheets demon­strated solar cell capa­bil­i­ties, using sun­light to pro­duce electricity.