A Thermometer In A Nanotube

Stone Rhino writes: "Yet another marvel has been created in the quest to create minature machines: a thermometer of liquid gallium within a carbon nanotube. The New York Times has an article on this. The thermometer is 10 microns long and measures temperatures from 120-950 degrees farenheit. Of course, the part I find most impractical about it is the fact that you need a scanning electron microscope to read it."

Comments

sounds interesting...

[Hadlock]

a better use of this (does this even have a use, other than proof-of-concept yet?) might be to, um, install one of these on nanobots, and have the liquid metal spurt from the end....somehow alerting the operator that the nanobots are about to overheat.

that's fascinating though, i was under the impression that carbon atoms were pretty small, and a nanotube would only be about 6 atoms across...from what i recall, lithium is pretty far away from carbon on the periodic chart. how does one fit one (or more) lithium atoms inside this tiny tiny tube?

Re:sounds interesting...

[CounterZer0]

A) Lithium isn't very far away, it's element #3 (to Carbon's 6), so it's ultra tiny.
But that's irrelevant, as this thermometer uses Gallium is #31 (the first element to be predicted before it was discovered), and Gallium is much bigger than carbon. But that's why the carbon is arranged into tubes - multiple atoms across, able to hold gallium atoms.

What I want to know, is if using the SEM to read the temp changes the temp? All those impinging electrons must raise the kinetic energy of the Gallium atoms at least a little?

Re:It seems weird now, but...

[markj02]

The inventors of the transistor would have predicted it. The transistor was quite explicitly intended as a replacement for bulky vacuum tubes with inconvenient power requirements, and that's how we are using them.