Many people have encountered situations when they inadvertently tied a knot on headphones or shoelaces that could not be untangled, but few expect to become a record-breaker thanks to this. Scientists, for their part, have done just that by accidentally tying the smallest and tightest knot, the size of which is only 54 atoms.
Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences were conducting chemical reactions to create tiny chains of gold, and one of them went awry, causing the chain to tie itself into a trefoil knot that looks like a pretzel.
When scientists analyzed the knot in more detail, it turned out that it set two records. It is noted that due to the fact that it consisted of only 54 atoms, it broke the record of the smallest knot in the world, which was previously 69 atoms. In addition, this knot was also the tightest, as the chain crossing coefficient was 23 units, while the previous record of the tightest knot was estimated at 24.
