Artist’s rendition of the vibration patterns of nanoscale crystalline silicon strings. Credit: Daniele Francaviglia
Artist's rendition of the vibration patterns of nanoscale crystalline silicon strings. Credit: Daniele Francaviglia - A team of scientists engineer nanoscale guitar strings that vibrate tens of billions of times when plucked at cryogenic temperatures, with a material originally developed for electronic transistors. Tightening a string, e.g. when tuning a guitar, makes it vibrate faster. But when strings are nano-sized, increased tension also reduces, or -dilutes-, the loss of the string's vibrational modes. This effect, known as -dissipation dilution-, has been exploited to develop mechanical devices for quantum technologies, where engineered, tensioned nanostrings with a thickness of just a few tens of atomic layers oscillate more than ten billion times after being plucked just once. The equivalent on a guitar would be a chord heard for about a year after being plucked. Researchers at EPFL, led by Professor Tobias J. Kippenberg, have now made a simple observation about crystal oscillators, which are ubiquitously used in electronic devices and are known to possess extremely small mechanical energy loss at low temperature.
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