Lifeboat Foundation

The team wondered if they could somehow leverage crystalline structures to identify a perfect candidate, sans building thousands of them in a lab.

The researchers were mostly on the lookout for 3D crystals with the right structural and electronic properties, so they could be “exfoliated.” 2D materials like graphene were extracted using this process from 3D.

However, this would be the first time researchers exfoliated one-dimensional materials like carbon nanotubes. This approach created a database of around 78,000 known 3D crystalline structures.