An article on the Small Times website ("South Koreans create building blocks for tiny, tailor-made nano-tranistors", by Peg Brickley, 27 February 2002) describes work by South Korean scientists at Seoul National University who packed nanotubes with tiny spherical fullerene molecules to create regions of varying semiconducting properties within each tube. The result is a hollow structure containing the equivalent of a series of tiny transistors far smaller than any now in existence, according to their research report that appeared in the 28 February 2002 issue of Nature.
This work takes a quick step toward practical application of results reported on 3 January 2002 by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Pennsylvania who discovered that carbon nanotubes packed with fullerene spheres, like so many peas in a pod, have tunable electronic properties.
