Nanotubes may have no ‘temperature’

August 18, 2004 | Source: Nature.com

Physicists have made a bizarre discovery: the concept of temperature is meaningless in some tiny objects because of the statistical fluctuations inherent in the quantum world.

Although the concept of temperature is known to break down on the scale of individual atoms, research now suggests that it may also fail to apply in rather larger entities, such as carbon nanotubes.

“If you’re down to a scale where temperature is not relevant, the fluctuations in physical properties of that system could be unpredictable, and that is potentially bad for any device,” says Peter Atkins, a physical chemist at University of Oxford.