Move over Elmer's: Nanoglue is thinner, stickier

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A cheap glue that gets stronger at high temperatures might be useful around the house, but make it 100,000 times thinner than a human hair and you have nanoglue, a sticky substance that could help make extremely tiny computer chips, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

Developed by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, nanoglue is made from ultrathin materials that are already commercially available.

"It is really mind-boggling to think about a single layer of molecules improving the adhesion of something," said materials science researcher Ganapathiraman Ramanath, whose work appears in the journal Nature.

"Our work shows the possibility of having organic-based nanolayers that are about a 1,000 times thinner than the thinnest organic-based glues," he said.

Similar toughness has been shown using layers as thin as one-millionth of a meter (yard), but never before with a thickness of only one nanometer -- which is just one billionth of a meter.

"This is a single layer of molecules that are organized like soldiers," Ramanath said in a telephone interview. The glue chain lines up in very orderly fashion all on its own.

"Nature does most of it for you," Ramanath said. "You just have to put the right thing on the top and the right thing on the bottom and it will work."

The glue has a backbone of carbon molecules. On one end of the chain is silica and oxygen and on the other is sulfur. These different end molecules act as hooks that bind with other surfaces.