Scottish ribbon is essential for creating exquisite diamond movies

The Scottish tape is great for wrapping gifts – and even for science.

With some Scottish tape and little creativity, it is possible to create diamond sheets up to five centimeters wide and as less than a thick micrometer, a team of researchers reports December 18th in Nature. Adhesive materials help release these thin diamond films created by the lab from their support, like peeling out of a fruit rotation.

Diamond has many special properties. It distributes heat extremely well, for example. This makes it attractive for use in electronics, potentially making smaller, more efficient or other transistors. And the material can be used to make quantum computers or quantum sensors (Sn: 9/19/22). But creating high quality, free diamond movies has been a challenge.

So when the electrical engineer Jixiang Jing of the University of Hong Kong accidentally undone a little diamond with a wrong part of the adhesive bar, the researchers decided to investigate further. Jing and colleagues deposited diamond in a silicone mass using a technique called chemical storage of the vapor (Sn: 4/24/24). Then they cut the mass to expose its edge, and glued the Scottish tape to the diamond. When they peel the back bar, the diamond layer came with it. After the tape was wasted in a chemical solution, the diamond stayed alone.

Diamond membranes can be used in a variety of ways, for example, by gluing them to another material to create layer appliances, or joining electrodes into them. As a test of the concept, the researchers made a worn sensor that could detect the bending of a wing based on the change in diamond resistance under strain.

Scientists have used Scottish tape in the past to create thin materials like graph, a sheet of graphite made of a single layer of carbon atoms (Sn: 3/10/14). Scottish tape is so useful, scientists are climbing it.