Slashdot Mirror
Light-Producing Nanotubes Could Mean Faster Chips
CannibalBob writes "From PCWorld: Researchers at IBM have used carbon molecules to emit light, a breakthrough that could replace silicon as the foundation of chips and lead to faster computers and telecommunication equipment. This is the first time light has ever been generated from a molecule by applying electricity. Read the article."
This is the first time light has ever been generated from a molecule by applying electricity
I always assumed with enough power ANYTHING could emit light.. if only for a brief time
How do light bulbs work? True, they burn as a side effect of being heated, but you apply electricity, and you [eventually] get light. Then there's the the whole laser thing... Florcent tubes?
"This is the first time light has ever been generated from a molecule by applying electricity"
Wow. These guys must have been living in the stone age.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
So If I drink this stuff and hold a battery will I shine?
Wouldn't ignorant jackholes who read too many bad sci-fi novels like Bill Joy worry about these "Nanotubes" going haywire and turning the planet to gray goo? Or would Apple sue them into oblivion for using "Carbon" in a computer without their express permission?
Despite millions of years of evolution, human beings, taken as a group, are still stupid, panicky animals.
>This is the first time light has ever been generated from a molecule by applying electricity.
Heck, if you put too much lighter fuel on the charcoal and apply your electric grill lighter while standing too close you'll see PLENTY of light from those charcoal molecules!
...and lead to faster computers and telecommunication equipment.
Doesn't it seem like this catch-phrase is tacked onto every new discovery? Couldn't these folks just be making nifty flashlight bulb replacements? Does EVERYTHING need to give us faster computers?
--
Not only that, I didn't see it mentioned in the article. What is our honoured submitter smokin'?
This is the real signature
(Beats those shadows on the cave wall, don't it?)
-A.M.
Pimpin' all the Karma Hoes!
otherwise i would have been unable to tell the true size
Was this a troll?
"Researchers at IBM have used carbon molecules to emit light, a breakthrough that could replace silicon as the foundation of chips and lead to faster computers and telecommunication equipment." (emphasis added)
It was also reported a year ago that they had created transistors using nanotubes, although not with light.
First molecule to emit light when electricity is applied? That would surprise the people working on organic LEDs, not to mention slightly older guys like Thom Edison, who managed to coax light out of graphite coated thread....
Pardon me for being skeptical (I am a theorist, not an experimentalist), but isn't there a revolutionary new 'Carbon Nano-tube Technology' every 2 months? I mean, how many of these technologies will be applicable with thier current specifications?
And not only that, but it seems that nano-tubes are not currently being mass produced in any reasonable way. If they are, why aren't more small graduate materials labratories basing research on them?
I'm not against plausible speculations to applied science, but it just seems that the carbon nano-tube technology is still in its beginning phases, and we won't see these 'small optical fibers' or any other applied devices anytime before 2020.
I'm a complete ignorant about these things. But how stable are these systems that work on nano levels? For instance if I would give my computer a hard kick, would it be affected in any way? The energy levels it works on are so low.
Yeah, then kill you because nanostuff gets through your skin and the light give you malinoma from the inside.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Here's the detailed info on all this:
IBM Research Light Emitting Carbon Nanotube news release
There's also an animation, but the pictures in the release are easier to follow.
JS - IBM Metaverse devteam
The opinions expressed here are mine & not necessarily representative of IBM
An atom that emits light...
couple of wires that carries electricity to that atom...
Sure we are going to eliinate electricity and use light for it has so many advantages?
Dinesh
Just in case you are wondering, it is white LEDs which will give you better flashlights. Maybe you can find something intersting to say about that.
If they managed to refine this enough, could we be seeing nanotube displays some time in the future? And how would the power drain compare to that of an LCD or OLED display?
would constitute a single molecule. Applying electricity to it, as pointed out in the article, they were able to produce light (1.5 micron). An LED, tungsten wire, or burning lump of coal are not made up of a single molecule, no more so than an ice cube is a single molecule of water. What this constitutes is an engineering first. What is left to be seen is if they can find useful applications and mass produce it.
End of Line.
Okay, we got electricity->light. but now we need something else to get it back to electricity iff light present.
After looking at the Babel-dy-gook of translations of the PPC 970 article, everything I read on slashdot had the appearance of broken English. Sigh. This too shall pass.
Anyways, couldn't they get much better performance if they had a electrical signal that had a not so fast not so regular repeating pattern of pulses of light and then used a second out of phase signal to modify it to get the correct pattern. Both signals could run at a lower rate (leaving room for improvement and lowering costs of development, time to market) and then the final pattern would be nearly the same as the single signal trying to do all the work. The single signal would approach the point of insufficient return on investment faster than the two signals.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Yes. The article doesn't mention much about how light will be recieved (though I suspect it will just happen in the reverse - light will generate electricity), and it also fails to point out that with the immense complexity of today's chips, it wouldn't be just an easy jump to convert existing designs to accept light pathways over silicon. This would require a new industry apart from the semiconductor sector, with new designs following different physics and fabrication techniques. That may be a great thing, but 'years' is most certainly how far away it is right now.
Since this is carbon, would it be possible to begin development on an organic computer that grows? Or is that still a ways off? I mean, I know they have windshield that "heal," and I think that works on a similar idea, but how far away are machines that are grown, rather than built?
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
Of course carbon can emit light... If you can turn lead into gold, you can make anything do anything. (What's that, you say? You can't turn lead into gold? Well, why not? You can turn a tree into a diamond! Don't believe me? What's a tree made of? Carbon. What's a diamond made of? Carbon. So they're both made of the same thing but look different... If the tree is turned into ashes which are then compressed with a shitload of pressure and heat, you'll get a diamond. That's expensive to do and diamonds aren't really that valuable when you consider that two families control the release of diamonds from their vast reserves. But turning lead into gold is relatively cheap and generates a huge return on investment. I regularly turn lead into gold but I won't tell you how it's done. You have to follow that path on your own and stumble along the way like I have. Once you know how, it's very easy. I'll tell you that much.) So, basically, what you're telling me is that if I apply enough electricity to something made out of carbon, it will emit light. That might explain some strange things.
Would it stand to reason that these devices would _generate_ electricity when bombarded by photons? Or would they be destroyed? :)
I'm sure several orders of magnitude more of these nanotubes would fit in the space of a solar cell.
Stephenson's aerostats just might work.
Perhaps someone with a background could answer.
- OrbNobz
I don't care about the answer, the nano-machine operating my fingers is asking.
Yes.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Now, not only can we build nanotube fiber cables to orbit, but we can light them up at night too!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
they're talking about making a MOSFET? I can't imagine them creating a light BJT...how would that work, anyway? Is beta then the ratio of the number of photons?
Hmmm.. I notice NanoGator is suspiciously missing from this discussion.
Oh my god! They've killed NanoGator with their evil research! Those bastards!
It's a joke - laugh.
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
Gee, I wonder if they've ever heard of LED's. That turns electricity directly into light.
imagine a blinding, sunshades-requiring, skin-melting, vampire-killing, burn-baby-burn, let-there-be-FUCKLOADS-of-light beowulf cluster of those.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
I once saw some cheesy scientist on the tonight show or letterman or whatever get light from a pickle! He stuck two forks in each end and connected each fork to the AC and the pickle lit up! I'm not sure what this has to do with computers but it was pretty cool!
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Three days ago
Optical computers have been discovered? Superconducting fibre will soon follow and we will be able to build the dreaded gatling laser!
/discoveries according to Alpha Centauri
After that it is only a matter of time before fusion power is harnessed and our units are twice as strong as the enemies!
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
I'm a graduate physics student (experimentalist), and I'll be working with nanotubes. But we're just building up our lab now (my advisor just arrived here only a few months ago). We'll be doing measurements with carbon nanotubes, initially continuing what we did last summer (at her old postdoc lab) by measuring superconducting nanowires. If you're curious, these nanowires are created by sputtering a superconducting alloy (MoGe) on top of a nanotube substrate. They're interesting because the system dimensions are small enough that the wires are effectively one-dimensional, which means they can't support long-range order and thus cannot allow Cooper-pair supercurrents to flow unimpeded through the wire.
It's hard to create nanotubes, and harder to put them where you want them. One way to create them is to use chemical vapor deposition (CVD), where you basically try to create a controlled environment where some hydrocarbon (eg methane) is ignited (the environment is somewhat oxygen-deficient so CO2 isn't the only carbon species produced) The 'soot' that is subsequently deposited on your substrate should contain nanotubes if the right conditions are met.
To get the tubes in certain places, sometimes little 'seeds' of iron particles are used, in hopes the nanotubes will grow/branch from them. It's hard to create good SWNT (Single-Walled Nanotubes), but easier to form 'ropes' of many nanotubes intertwined together.
Another difficult factor to control is the 'chirality' of the tube. Basically, a carbon nanotube is a rolled graphite sheet, but when the sheet is rolled, it can have certain 'twist' to it. For example, if you rolled lined paper into a cylinder, you can have zero helicity, in which case your lines will form independent circles. Or you can shift the lines by an integer number, in which case the lines will form helices of varying pitch. This factor in nanotubes determines the electronic band structure, which mandates whether the tubes are metallic or semiconducting. It would be highly desirable to be able to produce consistently tubes of the same chirality.
I hope this makes sense, I was up all night doing E&M homework (ya gotta love Jackson), so my brain is kinda fried right now.
make world, not war
Single-crystal semiconductors don't count?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Couldn't we just apply electricity and make all the carbon's in our bodies glow?
Please direct all bug reports to
After they perfect whatever process they used to develop this; theoretically, chips should be cheaper since fairly pure sources of carbon are fairly abundant (graphite, coal, ...). Of course this is assuming that manufacturing cost of it isn't some astronomical figure.
In high-school physics/electronics class, I used to get the lead out of a Pacer (propelling pencil, not a car), put it between two alligator clips and run 12 volts DC through them. Just like a light bulb, it burns rather brightly. Just unlike a light bulb, I didn't have it encased in a glass-sealed vacuum. Not to be funny, but I got a LOT of molecules to emit light just by applying electricity to them.
:-)
:->
Having RTF(under-detail-laden)A, a couple of questions spring to mind:
1) What's done to prevent the rapid over-oxidation, especially in something that astonishingly thin?
2) How long until LECNTs replaced those old-fashioned LEDs that are already providing so many of the household and street-traffic lights around today?
(and just because I have positive karma and realised it don't make no difference anymore...)
3) Profit!
" But both light bulbs and LEDs are made of big crystals of metal / silicon (as opposed to molecules). What is new here is the atomic structure of the of the light emitting material; it is nanotubes which technically are big molecules. This is a major discovery - although it is probably too early to tell exactly what it will be useful for in the future. "
How about better LEDs? Or video displays? Or light amplifiers for fiber networks?
Researchers at IBM have used carbon molecules to increase the average female bustline.
Melony Swayback, an IBM test subject states, "These new nanotube implants work great! Now they look perky without even wearing a bra!"
Director of IBM R&D states, "Wow! What CAN'T these things do??"
- My oranges are RIPE!
"Couldn't we just apply electricity and make all the carbon's in our bodies glow?"
Oh lovely. The Gilligan effect.
with the current trend in OSs by M$, no. Each new M$ OS is designed to give you a slower computer.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
"Researchers at IBM have used vacuum tubes to emit light, a breakthrough that could replace silicon as the foundation of chips and lead to faster computers and telecommunication equipment."
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Hrmmm.... lets look at the name.
OK, sorry, cheap shot. I work with this stuff... and carbon has been emitting light for a very long time. If the focus is a specific molecule, well, look at dopants- thats where the energy is released (hence the name)... and thats where the light comes from. Hosts provide the path.Kodak OLED information
Ahh, you must work with Nina Markovic, then, right?
Best of luck in your wires....
Yup. Do I know who you are? Come on, at least give me a little hint...
make world, not war
At last, something strong enough to make a light saber out of!
Nothing to see here; Move along.
It makes sense. :)
:P
;)
And the reason that I bring up mass production of the stuff is because it is often overlooked. I mean, Kroto and Smaley (the scientists that discovered fullerenes and won the nobel prize for it) analyzed spectrums to determine that there was a new form of carbon, but they couldnt separate it from the 'soot' and noone could really do experiments on it.
I know this because one of my undergrad profs at UofA Dr. Huffman talked about it quite a bit when he was able to use an enzyme to separate the c60 molecules from the soot, enabling a fairly cheap way of producing c60 molecules in bulk. He also showed a viewgraph of the research papers done on fullerenes before and after his discovery was published, and it went from 10000.
So yeah, have fun with your problem sets.
- L.A.S.E.R. light
- Light Emitting Diodes
- electriluminecent films
- Organic polymeric light (OLED)
All of these and -more- emit light when an electrical voltage is applied. One molecule at a time, even though there are plenty of them in aggregation.
So, the nanotube emitters are wonderful... but hardly the first. Just the _latest_. Still extremely interesting technology nonetheless.
"Don't worry about the problems you have in mathematics, I assure you mine are much greater." - Einstein c.1919
Thinking about it, would it not be feasible to make them emit harmonics (375nm blue, anyone?) for use in optical storage too?
I'm just a dumb old maths guy, not a physicist, but surely someone can enlighten us?
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
" How do light bulbs work? True, they burn as a side effect of being heated, but you apply electricity, and you [eventually] get light. Then there's the the whole laser thing... Florcent tubes?"
Actually they don't "burn". The filament in incandescent light bulbs heats up, boiling tungsten atoms off it's surface. These condense on the relatively cooler surface of the glass envelope. Which is why burned out light bulbs have a dark cast to them. There are high-pressure gas bulbs that fill the envelope with an inert gas, to retard evaporation. As well as using multi-filaments to give the bulb a longer life. Fluorescents also have filaments (the glow you see when first starting a bulb). But the flow of electricity is through a gas, causing it to glow. The wavelengths generated hit the phosphors causing them to glow. And hence the light you see. No "burning" though.
I took the story as implying that conventionally, photons were observed to be emmited by the transistion in state of atoms, not molecules; but with nanotubes, a transition in state of the molecule is beleived to yeild photons.
I know a discharge tubes full of a noble gasses are examples of light from a change in state of atoms (like a neon sign), but how do they define the difference that lets them say a molecule emmits photons when it may be composed of atoms individually emmiting light?
In theatrical lighting, the power stage is separated from the signal side by an optocoupler--which basically ensures that if the power stage leaks 240VAC, it won't travel down the DMX wire and fry everything else.
I wonder if they could use these "lighted" carbon nanotubes to put an optocoupler directly on the IGBT of the dimmer...that, as my coworkers would say, would be "freakin' awesome"!
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
I'd like to know if these light-emitting nanotubes can be used for nanoprinting of ultra-dense transistor chips. Talk about entering into the next age of computing power ...
-- Dossy
Dossy's Blog
I beg to differ. Silicon has been made to emit light in various ways for over a decade.
"Scientists at Surrey University, led by researcher Kevin Homewood, are showing off a prototype silicon-based light-emitting diode (LED) -- an invention that could be of significance to the whole electronics and communication industry.
"By enabling silicon to emit light, the scientists say they may have found a way to use light to efficiently transfer data around microchips. This could lead to smaller, more powerful computers and improve data communications significantly."
ZDNet UK: Light-emitting silicon boosts chip speeds: 8th March 2001
"The photoluminescence emanating from a regular array of 1.2 m sized dots composed of Si nanocrystals was studied with spatial, spectral and temporal resolution."
New Journal of Physics: Nanostructuration with visible-light-emitting silicon nanocrystals
"GENEVA, Switzerland -- STMicrolectronics claims to have achieved a breakthrough in the creation of light-emitting silicon and said it would have engineering samples of monolithic silicon devices based on the technology, combining electrical isolation and optical communication, before the end of 2002.
"The development allows silicon light emitters to match the efficiency of compound semiconductor materials such as gallium arsenide for the first time, the company said."
EE Times: STMicro claims light-emitting silicon breakthrough: October 28, 2002
"The discovery of visible luminescence from porous silicon [1] has stimulated a large interest in this material. Numerous studies have demonstrated that it is possible to achieve efficient visible luminescence from porous silicon layers [2]. This material system has significant economic potential as efficient visible emitters could be fabricated on silicon wafers and incorporated with current microelectronic devices using existing silicon processing technologies."
[1] L. T. Canham. "Silicon quantum wire array fabrication by electrochemical and chemical dissolution of wafers." Appl. Phys.Lett., 1990, 57 1046 - 1048.
[2] For a recent review of the work in porous silicon see : Thin Solid Films, 1995, 225 and "Porous Silicon", edited by Z. Chuan and R Tsu, World Scientific, Singapore, 1995.
A Visible Large Area Light Emitting Diode Fabricated From Porous Silicon Using A Conducting Polyaniline Contact
BTW, technically, photocells are optoelectronic devices, as are LEDs.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
Doesn't anyone remember this? Nanotubes seem to catch fire when you take pictures of them with a flash camera. How is putting light inside the tube going to take care of this *small* problem?
I doubt it. I'm a junior faculty member at Rice
who's done work on nanowires, too. I've met Dr. Marcovic a couple of times at APS meetings.
Cheers - D. Natelson
If you are working on something with the word "transistor" in it, that is small and uses electrons(as I am) reporters will put these words in your mouth no matter what. You can carefully explain for 45 minutes what you are doing and why, and wether or not they pretend to listen, they'll ask wether this will lead to faster computers, and that will be the headline regardless of your answer. In general, I think that while science ranges from mediocre to unbelievably incredible journalism tends to range from mediocre to unbelievably terrible.
why my computer lights up when it is running, doesn't it?
apply light and you get an explosion...
apply light and you get an explosion...
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
The statement is essentially correct... if you add the word "single" in front of the word "molecule" =)
OLEDs, LEDs and light-bulbs, etc, all have a few billion molecules (or several google molecules in the case of ol' Thom's thread) that are triggered to make that light. What is special about this is that just a single molecule has had electricity applied to produce the light - in just that molecule, not any others.
I hope that cleared that up for you.
-Trav
I should really get around to creating a sig.... Nah - too lazy =)
The parent is correct, it certainly is not the first time that light has ever been generated from a molecule by applying electricity!
I refer you to the parent's link and Cambrige Display Technology. Both are well on the way in the development of applications for simple polymer molecules that emit light when a current is passed.
I know that the simplest LEP Cambridge Display Technologies discovered (PPV) is of a similar scale (if not even smaller in diameter) to nanotubes, however I can't compare efficiencies, nor do I know much about optoelectronics so I couldn't say how a wavelength of 1.5 microns (the emission quoted in the article) compares to those of LEPs (visible light so between 400 and 700 nanometers).
My point is that I dispute the article's claim that it is the first time that molecules have produced light when an electrical potential is placed across them. Perhaps IBM think that nanotube light emission is more suited to optoelectronics than OLEDS/LEPs.
If you want to learn more about LEPs I did a project on them as part of my Chemistry degree, it's hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry here and a slightly more up-to-date but not as pretty version is hosted here
If you can recall the scare-paper featured on slashdot the other week which discussed why nanoparticles were potentially dangerous to people's health.
It suggested that nanotubes could act like asbestos if inhaled. That was one of the few points in the paper that I thought was credible. They are immensely sharp, pointy, often branched and light enough to be carried by air.
It might be dangerous in the future to dispose of your computer!
I don't supose you saw a sample of pure fullerenes did you? I can only imagine what interesting properties such a material would have.
Would it be an extremely fine powder? Would the individual balls bounce? Would it be a lubricant? Any ideas?
I am a graduate student in organic chemistry at the UCLA Exotic Materials Institute which basically means I read about this tuff all day long (and I can't spell). In fact, a researcher from IBM just gave a talk here two weeks ago, but on a different topic. I am at work, so I couldn't read all the posts, but I felt I needed to throw in my two cents anyway... Getting molecules to emit light is easy. You can do it with light (e.g. fluorescence) or eletric fields (e.g. electroluminescence) or even chemical reactions (think glow sticks). OLEDs do in fact use the same method to generate light, but are comprised of many molecules and different molecules, like phosphore doped conducting polymers. An example is OLEDs based on C60, which was the hot "nanotech" molecule of yesteryear, but is a carbon allotrope like nanotubes. Anyway, PLED's are polymer based LEDs in which a single molecular component (a polymer) conducts the current and emits the light. Light emitting nanotubes are the latest application of the "nantotech" flavor of the month. Isolating single SWCNTs (single walled carbon nanotubes) between tiny electrodes has lead to a whole field of research, for example SWCNT chemosensors. Every single paper beings with "the first time a single molecule has been used for ______" because that's how you sell it. The neat thing about what IBM has done is to use a carbon allotrope (in chemistry land we aren't allowed to say carbon molecule) in a new functional device. So instead of PLEDs and OLEDs which have the difficult synthesize/purify steps on top of the difficult device fabrication step, you can get nanotubes to grow directly on (or across) your device (substrate). Emission wavelengths can be controlled readily by alterting the morphology and size of the tubes. Ok, so summarize; SWCNTs are easy to make relative to other organic molecules (that have similar properties). Any device made from a SWCNT is "the first time _____ has been done with a single molecule". Any device fabricated from a carbon allotrope has applications in "replacing modern silicon based ____ " because it is comprised of only carbon atoms... Granted this is all my opinion, so don't take it as the gospel truth unless you're well informed enough to know about the research I'm talking about first hand.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
I read a few years back that porous silicon emits
light when a current is passed through it so this article lies when it says that silicon does not emit light
Yeah, I can tell your brain is fried. But you still managed to give a clearer picture of the current state of nanotech than any of the gee-whiz stuff I've read recently. Lots of nanotech enthusiasts seem to think it's like building radio-controlled cars, only smaller. Please consider starting a blog or something!
This is a link to gay porn that will spawn an infinite number of windows. click at your own peril