The research team created a ‘pavement’ of pentagonal cyclopentadienyl (C5H5) ‘tiles’ — resulting in a stable and highly conductive film.As project lead Dr Holly Hedgeland of Cambridge explained to The Engineer, it represents an important step in the ‘bottom-up’ manufacture of nanoscale devices. ‘Obviously you can manufacture things on a one-off basis, using things such as probe microscopy — pushing things around with a tip basically — but that’s not going to be scaled up to anything that’s realistic,’ she said. ’We’re really trying to look at the fundamental properties and see how we can use them.’
