Research Highlights

Nanoartisans Cindy Regal, John Teufel, and Konrad Lehnert have come up with a clever new way to observe ordinary (very small) things behaving quantum mechanically. They’ve tucked a nanomechanical beam (which is actually a really thin aluminum wire) inside a tiny resonant microwave cavity made of lightweight superconducting aluminum. This design ensures that very small forces will cause large detectable motion.

A key challenge in developing new nanotechnologies is figuring out a fast, low-noise technique for translating small mechanical motions into reasonable electronic signals. Solving this problem will one day make it possible to build electronic signal processing devices that are much more compact than their purely electronic counterparts. Much sooner, it will enable the design of advanced scanning tunneling microscopes that operate hundreds to thousands of times faster than current models.

The race is on! Two mice chase one another around a curvy, roughly elliptical white stripe. But, the goal can't be the finish line – because there isn't one. Rather, the contest seems to be: Which mouse will stay on track for the longest time before spinning out of control? Of the two, one clearly "wags its tail" less as its phototransistor eyes guide it along the reflective white strip.