Shape of things to comeWorld's first: Fully functional nanotube radio

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“Our nanotube radio is sophisticated and elegant in the physics of its operation, but sheer simplicity in technical design. Everything about it works perfectly, without additional patches or tricks.”

Alex Zettl of the Berkeley Lab about his nantube radio

Looking for good business ideas? Call Berkeley Lab’s Technology Transfer Department — they are looking for industrial partners to develop further and commercialize a truly revolutionary breakthrough. Read the following story first, though, so you are prepared. You have an iPod? How about a nanopod? Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have created the first fully functional radio from a single carbon nanotube, which makes it the smallest radio ever made — not just smaller, but by several orders of magnitude smaller than any previously made radio. “A single carbon nanotube molecule serves simultaneously as all essential components of a radio — antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier, and demodulator,” said physicist Alex Zettl, who led the invention of the nanotube radio. “Using carrier waves in the commercially relevant 40-400 MHz range and both frequency and amplitude modulation (FM and AM), we were able to demonstrate successful music and voice reception.” Since the nanotube radio essentially assembles itself and can be easily tuned to a desired frequency band after fabrication, Zettl believes that nanoradios will be relatively easy to mass-produce. Potential applications, in addition to incredibly tiny radio receivers, include a new generation of wireless communication devices and monitors. Nanotube radio technology could prove especially valuable for biological and medical applications. “The entire radio would easily fit inside a living cell, and this small size allows it to safely interact with biological systems,” Zettl said. “One can envision interfaces with brain or muscle functions, or radio-controlled devices moving through the bloodstream.” It is also possible that the nanotube radio could be implanted in the inner ear as an entirely new and discrete way of transmitting information, or as a radically new method of correcting impaired hearing. Zettl holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division (MSD) and the University of California-Berkeley Physics Department where he is the director of the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems. In recent years he and his research group have created an astonishing array of devices out of carbon nanotubes —