Ya’ll heard of MEMs (micro-electromechanical devices), right? So it was never gonna be long before we got the lowdown on NEMS nano-electromechanical devices. They’re a-comin atcha.
The problem is that to make anything move on the nano scale, ya gotta yank it with an electric field and that means having a metallic conducting layer in there somewhere. Now adding a metal layer makes NEMs heavy, bulky and slow.
But Dominik “Peeble” Scheible at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Germany says he’s souped up the existing design for NEMS to make ’em faster, lighter and better—yeeehaaa.
Peeble Scheible’s solution is to make NEMs out of a semiconductor such as silicon and create conducting regions within the silicon by implanting dopant atoms using focused ion beams.
He’s even gone and built himself a lil bitty nanobeam resonator out of silicon doped with gallium to prove he can do it. And it is bee-yoo-tiful–it’s nanoform following nanofuntion. A-sleek and a-shiny too. Ah am impressed.
And now ya’ll just sit tight for pico, femto and atto-electromechanical devices.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0708.1296: Doped Nano-Electromechanical Systems