A Thermometer In A Nanotube 18
Stone Rhino writes: "Yet another marvel has been created in the quest to create minature machines: a thermometer of liquid gallium within a carbon nanotube. The New York Times has an article on this. The thermometer is 10 microns long and measures temperatures from 120-950 degrees farenheit. Of course, the part I find most impractical about it is the fact that you need a scanning electron microscope to read it."
Sure the thermometer is small (Score:2, Funny)
Well, okay, but do you want it in there the whole time they take your temperature?
Someday...... (Score:1)
I can't wait for the day that someone will figure out how to just hook bluetooth up to this thing
sounds interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
that's fascinating though, i was under the impression that carbon atoms were pretty small, and a nanotube would only be about 6 atoms across...from what i recall, lithium is pretty far away from carbon on the periodic chart. how does one fit one (or more) lithium atoms inside this tiny tiny tube?
Re:sounds interesting... (Score:4, Insightful)
But that's irrelevant, as this thermometer uses Gallium is #31 (the first element to be predicted before it was discovered), and Gallium is much bigger than carbon. But that's why the carbon is arranged into tubes - multiple atoms across, able to hold gallium atoms.
What I want to know, is if using the SEM to read the temp changes the temp? All those impinging electrons must raise the kinetic energy of the Gallium atoms at least a little?
Re:sounds interesting... (Score:1)
Does anybody know if liquid Gallium, or any other suitable replacement, conducts electricity? Then one could measure the current induced by an electric field, or vice versa, to infer the temperature. I think these might provide less 'feedback' than an electron microscope, if the field and current measurement were also nano-localized.
Or maybe if is there a liquid dielectric of suitable scale, the temperature could somehow be inferred from this (using a wall of several adjacent nanotubes perhaps to create a varying area)?
Just some speculative questions... Of course, it'd be cool someday to see a nanocomputer.
Re:sounds interesting... (Score:1)
Re:sounds interesting... (Score:2)
The diameter of the tubes, as quoted in the article, is 75nm (that's a lot more than one carbon atom across). The average interatomic spacing of liquid gallium atoms is .26nm, if I did my math right. So the tubes are ~300 gallium atoms across. (BTW, these sound like some exceptionally wide nanotubes.)
As for changing the temperature of the thermometer by reading it, there is of course some change. But at that scale, thermal conduction is pretty much instantaneous, so you heat up the whole system (gallium, carbon tube, and whatever it's mounted on) at once. The change in temperature of the entire system from the electron beam is presumably negligible.
In a related note, British scientists... (Score:2, Funny)
Great ! (Score:1)
Celsius (Score:1)
120-950 degrees farenheit
equals
322-783 Kelvin
what is wrong with those SI units anyway?
Re:Celsius (Score:1)
It seems weird now, but... (Score:2)
This thermometer probably isn't too useful on its own, but just shows that stuff you can build from 'big' components can also be done in nano scale.
I wish I was working in nanotech....
Re:It seems weird now, but... (Score:3, Informative)
impractical for now... (Score:1)