Rice crew revved for Nanocar Race

Nanocar creator James Tour and team take on international competition with single-molecule marvel 

Rice University chemist James Tour and members of his international team will meet in Toulouse, France, next week for the first Nanocar Race, a competition between single-molecule cars on a track that can only be viewed through a microscope.

An early nanocar with buckyball wheels was created by the lab of Rice chemist James Tour. A late model will compete in the first Nanocar Race. Courtesy of the Tour Group

The race begins April 28 at 4 a.m. Central Daylight Time. It pits the team from Rice and Graz University in Austria against competitors from France, Switzerland, Germany, Japan and Ohio University.

It will take place on a cold gold surface under a one-of-a-kind scanning tunneling microscope with a resolution of 2 picometers, or 1/1,000th of a nanometer.

A live stream of the competition can be viewed in several ways:

— On the race website at http://nanocar-race.cnrs.fr.

— On the event’s YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCkQixqt0xegeVEmo9y9gMXQ.

— And on Facebook: www.facebook.com/events/294623327625032/.

Tour’s lab built the world’s first nanocar in 2005, a single molecule with four buckyball wheels, a chassis and axles. His lab has since expanded its molecular gallery to nanoroadsters, nanosubmarines and even nanokids.

Tour is the T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of computer science and of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice.