Microphone for light: Tiny guitar string vibrates 1 billion times when plucked

Scientists have engineered a tiny guitar string that vibrates 1 billion times when plucked to use as a microphone for light.

Listening to light


Strain can be used to engineer unusual properties at the nanoscale. Researchers in Tobias Kippenberg's lab at EPFL have harnessed this effect to engineer an extremely low loss nanostring. When plucked, the string vibrates for minutes with a period of a microsecond (equivalent to a standard guitar note playing for a month). Using it as an ultrasensitive microphone, the researchers hope to be able to "hear" the sound of photons in a laser beam.

Because of their small mass, nanostrings, like the ones developed in the Kippenberg lab, are expected to have an important impact on traditional sensing applications. For example, they are capable of detecting attonewtons (1 attonewton = 1.0 × 10^-18 newton), which could detect the gravitational pull between human beings.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180412141008.htm