• Question: . how do the plastics that absorb electrisity work .have you descovered any crystals that are harder/tougher than diamond . what are the plastics called .do any crytals glow in the dark

    Asked by themegabeno to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 20 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 20 Mar 2012:

      There are plenty of crystals that glow in the dark, so long as the substance they are made from does. In terms of things that are harder than diamonds I think Wurzite boron nitride and Lonsdaleite are harder though they are both very very rare and no I did not personally discover them ;).

      Now you want to be careful about your terminology here. All things absorb electricity but I think what you meant was conduct? Conductive plastics do exist and the mechanism of their conductivity is the same as in metals. Electrical currents are the transfer of electrons through a material. Metals are good at this because they have a layer of ‘free’ electrons that can readily transfer from atom to atom in a metallic structure.

      In plastics conductivity tends to arise where you have multiple alternating double bonds on molecules that are largely carbon based. Here are some examples:

      The fun thing about molecules like this is that the position of the double bond is not stable. It is possible for the outer most electron contributing to this double bond to switch position. In organic chemistry this is known as a molecules “electronic configuration”. Because these molecules have highly mobile electrons it is possible for them to conduct electricity.

    • Photo: Robert Thompson

      Robert Thompson answered on 20 Mar 2012:

      Hey cool Question, so this is my research. I’m not sure what you mean by plastics that absorb electricity, there are plastics that conduct electricity, and there are plastics that absorb light to produce electric currents.

      As Marcus said these are always! conjugated or lots of 2 bond one bond action going on. ….. a nice way I like to think of it is if we line a lot people up and say hold hands. I then say I want you to pass a clap down the line, you cant do it because no one has a spare hand to reach on to clap. but if each person had three hands. you could quite easily pass a clap down the line. This is kind of in a round about way how it works.

      I haven’t found a crystal tougher than diamond but then I haven’t been looking. and yes there are crystals that glow in the dark. The crystal I use “rubrene” is actually used in glow sticks.

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