This thermopower process works as follows: the heat sets up a chain reaction, and a wave of conversion travels down the nanotubes at a speed of about 10 m/s.

"Carbon nanotubes continue to teach us new things - thermopower waves as a first discovery open a new space of power generation and reactive wave physics," Strano says.

A typical lithium ion battery has a power density of 1 kW/kg. Although the MIT researchers have yet to scale up their nanotube materials, they obtain discharge pulses with power densities around 7 kW/kg.

Strano will also be reporting new results on experiments exploiting carbon nanopores of unprecedented size, 1.7 nm in diameter and 500 microns long.

"Carbon nanopores," he says, "allow us to trap and detect single molecules and count them one by one," the first time this has been done. And this was at room temperature.

The single molecules under study can move across the nanotubes one at a time in a process called coherence resonance. "This has never been shown before for any inorganic system to date," says Strano, "but it underpins the workings of biological ion channels."

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