Generating Nano Oscillatory Motion

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.

That ain't twee.

[camperdave]

I didn't know what "twee" was, so I had to look it up. Applying the jive filter doesn't make it nauseatingly cute, just nauseating.

Besides, is this what Slashdot has devolved to? All you have to do is apply a text filter to an article to get your story submission accepted? Sheesh! Maybe if I had borkified the story I submitted a couple of weeks ago about the shuttle not needing its tiles repaired it wouldn't have been rejected.

Re:Smaller Scale Still

[jcorno]

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

Yeah. At random frequencies, and in random directions. What good is that?

Not only twee...it is wrong too

[Roger W Moore]

Firstly electromagnetism is understood down to scales many orders of magnitudes lower than the nanoscale. QED is the second most accurate scientific theory ever (special relativity is the winner) and works at distances considerably less than nuclear diameters (one million times smaller than nano-scale). Secondly a pendulum does not convert a constant force into an oscillation because it has to have an initial excitation in the form of an applied force. This force must be applied and then removed so it is non-constant. Even if we ignore that the pendulum requires a string tension to work and that is an EM force so it is wrong to think of it as pure gravity. Conclusion: this guys physics is as heavily accented as his american.