Timeline Image Credit

Nano-Guitar (2 microns reference line) [Note: this structure is 10 microns in length.] PHOTO CAPTION from article in Notes: Electron-microscope image of the world's smallest guitar, based roughly on the design for the Fender Stratocaster, a popular electric guitar. Its length is 10 millionths of a meter--approximately the size of a red blood cell and about 1/20th the width of a single human hair. Its strings have a width of about 50 billionths of a meter (the size of approximately 100 atoms). Plucking the tiny strings would produce a high-pitched sound at the inaudible frequency of approximately 10 megahertz. Made by Cornell researchers with a single silicon crystal, this tiny guitar is a playful example of nanotechnology, in which scientists arebuilding machines and structures on the scale of billionths of a meter to perform useful technological functions and study processes at the submicroscopic level.

 

"Nanoguitar" microelectromechanical structure (10 microns), 1997, courtesy of Dustin W. Carr and Harold G. Craighead, Cornell Nanofabrication Facility and the School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University.