World's smallest electric motor measures just 1 nanometre across!

London - 06 Sep 2011 (ANI): Chemists at Tufts have developed the world's smallest electric motor made from a single molecule, a development that may potentially create a new class of devices with applications ranging from medicine to engineering.

In the new study, the Tufts team reports an electric motor that measures a mere 1 nanometre across, groundbreaking work considering that the current world record is a 200 nanometre motor. A single strand of human hair is about 60,000 nanometres wide.

"There has been significant progress in the construction of molecular motors powered by light and by chemical reactions, but this is the first time that electrically-driven molecular motors have been demonstrated, despite a few theoretical proposals," said E. Charles H. Sykes, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry at Tufts and senior author on the paper.

"We have been able to show that you can provide electricity to a single molecule and get it to do something that is not just random." The study was recently published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.