Nano guitar

The nano guitar is a microscopically small carved guitar. It was developed by Dustin W. Carr in 1997, under the direction of Professor Harold G. Craighead, in the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility. The idea came about as a fun way to illustrate nanotechnology, and captured popular attention.[1] It is disputed as to whether the nano guitar should be classified as a guitar, but it is the common opinion that it is in fact a guitar.[2]

Explanation

Nanotechnology miniaturizes normal objects, in this case a guitar. It can be used to create tiny cameras, scales and covert listening devices. An example of this is smart dust, which can be either a camera or a listening device smaller than a grain of sand.[3] A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. For comparison, a human hair is about 200,000 nanometers thick. The nano guitar is about as long as one-twentieth of the diameter of a human hair, 10 micrometers or 10,000 nanometers long. Each of the six 'strings' are 50 nanometers wide. The entire guitar is the size of an average red blood cell. The guitar is carved from a grain of crystalline silicon by scanning a laser over a film called a 'resist'. This technique is known as electron-beam lithography.

The guitar strings can be made to vibrate by tiny lasers using an atomic force microscope, in the same way a guitar player might use a plectrum. The strings vibrate at around 40 000 000 Hz, roughly 15 octaves higher than a normal guitar, which can typically reach up to 1318.510 Hz. Even if its sound were amplified, it could not be detected by the human ear.[4]

Implications

The nano guitar illustrates inaudible technology that is not meant for musical entertainment. The application of frequencies generated by nano-objects is called sonification. Such objects can represent numerical data and provide support for information processing activities of many different kinds that produce synthetic non-verbal sounds.[5] Since the manufacture of the nano-guitar, researchers in the lab headed by Dr. Craighead have built even tinier devices. One thought is that they may be useful as tiny scales to measure tinier particles, such as bacteria, which may aid in diagnosis.[6]

More recently, physicists at the University of Washington published an article discussing the hope that the technique will be useful to test aspects of what until now has been purely theoretical physics, and they also hope it might have practical applications for sensing conditions at atomic and molecular scales.[7]

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See also

References
  1. Payne J, Phillips M, The World’s Best Book. Running Press, 2009. ISBN 0-7624-3755-3, p. 109
  2. Schummer J, Baird D. Nanotechnology Challenges: implications for philosophy, ethics and society. World Scientific, 2006. ISBN 981-256-729-1, pp. 50–51; Nordmann A. Noumenal Technology: Reflections on the incredible tininess of nano. Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology 8(3), 2005 read online, accessed August 15, 2010 Archived July 21, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  3. Piddock, Charles. Future Tech. Creative Media Applications, Inc. 2009. ISBN 978-1-4263-0468-2, pp. 35–39
  4. Physics News Update 659(3), October 28, 2003, The High and Low Notes of the Universe read online (accessed 15 August, 2010)
  5. Barrass S, Kramer G. Using sonification. Multimedia Systems 7:23–31, 1999.
  6. “Nano becomes ‘atto’ and will soon be ‘zepto’ for Cornell.” Azonanotechnology, April, 2004. read online, accessed 15 August, 2010
  7. Wang Z. et al. Phase transitions of adsorbed atoms on the surface of a carbon nanotube. Science 327:552, 2010 DOI 10.1126/science.1182507 read article online, accessed August 15, 2010

Further reading on nanotechnology
  • Drexler, K. Eric, Nanosystems, Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation. P. 254-257. John Wiley and Son Inc. Canada. 1992. ISBN 0-471-57518-6.
  • Mulhall, Douglas, Our Molecular Future. Prometheus Books. 59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, NY. 2002. ISBN 1-57392-992-1
  • Piddock, Charles. Future Tech. P. 35-39 Creative Media Applications, Inc. 2009. ISBN 978-1-4263-0468-2
  • Sargent, Ted. The Dance of Molecules. Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, NY. 2006. ISBN 1-56025-809-8
  • Storrs Hall Ph.D., J., Nanofuture. P. 9-10. Prometheus Books. 59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, NY. 2005. ISBN 1-59102-287-8
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