A Riff from the Mesoscale?

bethanie writes: "From the New York Times: 'Cornell University physicists reported they had used a laser beam to pluck the strings of a tiny silicon guitar just 10 millionths of a meter long! Using the same kind of technology that etches the tiny wires and components onto computer chips, the researchers at Cornell's NanoScale Science and Technology Facility have also constructed a nanodrum from a crisscross diamond mesh and a nanoxylophone with tiny diamond bars. If nanomanufacturing comes of age, something as tiny as a nanodrum or nanoharp might be mass-produced for use as extremely sensitive detectors for ultra high-frequency waves. Scientists have recently demonstrated infinitesimal nanotube thermometers and nanobalances capable of weighing a single virus. All this may foreshadow a day when doctors use nanocapsules to carry medicines, a few molecules at a time, to precise locations in the body, and nanorobots to crawl through the bloodstream and repair cells.' Well, scientific advancements that can save humankind are all well and good, but the real question is: Did they play Stairway to Heaven?"

Comments

That guitar isn't pratical

[rritterson]

Doing a napkin style calculation, and assuming normal guitar strings vibrate at 440 hz (which they do), and assuming the silicon has similar properties as the bronze (which it probably doesn't)

f*lambda = v (for waves)

a guitar is about 1.5m long, and the lowest standing wave has wavelength 2*l, or 3m, thus the velocity of the guitar string is about 1320 meters/sec. Assuming the silicon vibrates as the same speed, lambda is now 20 microns, so the frequency is about 60 MHz!

Maybe Superman's dog can hear that guitar play, but I sure can't.

(Maybe we can use it as the clock of some sort of embedded CPU- my 486 DX2 was about 60MHZ)