Saturday, 01 March, 2008
Crossing a bridge into the unknown
The ability to excite extreme states of motion such as shock waves in nanomechanical resonators will provide new insights into the interactions between electrons and phonons.
In November 1940, a suspension bridge over the Tacoma Narrows in Washington state in the US began oscillating in gale force winds and eventually collapsed in a spectacular manner. Recently Florian Beil of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and co-workers in Germany and the US built a bridge that was some two billion times smaller but could oscillate in a more extreme manner without collapsing. Beil and co-workers took their bridge to its mechanical limits and observed clear evidence for shock phenomena in the process. (...)
Reference: "Crossing a bridge into the unknown"
by Charles H. Mielke and Alexander V. Balatsky, nature nanotechnology VOL 3 March 2008