Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Generating Nano Oscillatory Motion

Posted by kdawson on from the maybe-you-could-power-an-atomic-clock dept.

KentuckyFC sends us to arxivblog.com, where he summarizes (in prose that is somewhat more twee than we usually encounter in writing about physics) the conversion of a constant force into oscillatory motion on the nano scale. Here is the article preprint. A research group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has made mushroom-shaped nano-pillars that oscillate in a constant DC field, like metronomes.

4 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Twee by camperdave · · Score: 3, Informative

    Twee: Nausiatingly cute.

    --
    When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    1. Re:Twee by MontyApollo · · Score: 2, Informative

      The title is "Invasion of the jivin' nano-shrooms" just to give you a taste of the twee.

  2. Smaller Scale Still by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 2, Informative

    Excuse me, but, doesn't this happen on the atomic level? Apply heat, and atoms vibrate.

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  3. Re:(YES it is) - Re:NOT a constant force. by Control+Group · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's really no different a concept than seeing a bouncing ball as subject to a constant (gravitational) force, except when it's not, as when the concrete smacks it back upward.

    If you have an oscillating body of a given mass, then obviously the net force on the body isn't constant, given F=ma. There's no question about that (though it would certainly be newsworthy if someone discovered that F=ma doesn't hold). The question here is whether the input force is constant. The story is that they've replicated on a nano-scale turning a constant force input into an oscillating net force at the point of interest, something which has apparently not been done before.
    --

    Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...