The knot is composed of 54 atoms, chained together and ensnared in a trefoil, thesimplest nontrivial knot.
The knot has no loose end; it is a continuous loop, passing through itself in mesmerizing arcs.
The teams work describing the self-assembled metallaknot waspublishedin Nature Communications.
A trefoil knot.Illustration:Wikimedia Commons
It is made up of gold, carbon, and phosphorus, asreported by New Scientist.
You may wonder how a team determines the tightness of a knot at the molecular scale.
The smaller the BCR, the tighter the knot.
The newestand indeed, smallest and tightest knotbeats the 2020 record.
The new knot is just 54 atoms long, and has a remarkably low BCR of just 18.
It is tighter than the BCR of the tightest organic trefoil knots by a BCR margin of 7.3.
The recent accomplishment is knoter, notthe only knot to hold a place in the Guinness Book.
Thelargest human knotwas made in 2019 and involved 123 people.
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