Quantum-mechanical calculations and modeling carried out by physicists from NRNU MEPhI showed that three-dimensional crystal forms of the hypercube have conductivity: two of the three turned out to be semiconductors and one was conductive. The results of the study were published in the journal Materials Today Communications.
Despite its simplicity, the cube is a rare form for hydrocarbon molecules. In 1964, scientists managed to synthesize one of these “exotic” compounds – cuban C.8H8A hydrocarbon has almost twice the density of gasoline. The substance showed high stability and became the ancestor of a whole family of derivatives used as medicine and energy-efficient fuel.
In 2014, Italian physicist Fabio Piccieri proposed an even more complex hydrocarbon molecule, inspired by the films of the Marvel universe – hypercube C.40H24. This is a molecular analog of a tesseract: it has two nested shells and resembles the projection of a four-dimensional cube onto a three-dimensional space. Visible 3D cubes are the faces of the tesseract.
Examination of the molecule’s properties showed that, contrary to expectations, the molecule is extremely durable – it can live for about three million years at room temperature. In 2020, Chinese scientists created two-dimensional crystals based on hypercube.
Structural models built by Russian scientists have shown that hypercube can also form three-dimensional crystals. It turns out that the hypercube can take the shape of three types of cubic crystal lattices: simple cubic, body-centered and face-centered.
Scientists have described the behavior of their electrons by solving quantum mechanics equations. The first two forms turned out to be semiconductors, and the last one turned out to be a conductor, said one of the researchers, a professor at the National University for Nuclear Research MEPhI Institute for Electronics, Spintronics and Photonics Nanotechnology.
According to scientists, hypercuba has prospects for use as a component of lithium-ion batteries and as a photocatalyst.
Source: Ferra
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