THE world's smallest guitar is about the size of a human blood cell, with a width of around one-twentieth of the thickness of a human hair.
Dustin Carr and Harold Craighead of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sculpted the "nanoguitar" from a layer of crystalline silicon on an oxide substrate using a beam of electrons. They then chemically etched away some of the oxide to leave six free-standing guitar strings, each about 100 atoms thick.
You could strum the nanoguitar with the tip of an atomic force microscope, but it would twang very softly—and at frequencies inaudible to the human ear. "We are just interested in seeing how far we can push the technology," says Carr, who hopes to develop tiny mechanical devices for electronic and fibreoptic systems.
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