Italian version
.emusic
20.11.03 Nano guitar, inaudible nanosounds.
A Nano guitar, that is, a guitar built on a nanometric scale, has been built by Harold G. Craighead and Dustin W. Carr of Cornell University. It's 10 micrometers long, the length of a human cell, and has got six strings about a hundred atoms wide. It's therefore an instrument invisible to the naked eye which, if played by a laser beam, emits inaudible notes which, at 40 megahertz, are 17 octaves higher than those of a normal guitar. Since such a little microphone doesn't exist, the sound is recorded by analyzing the laser beam reflected by the structure and contains frequencies among the highest known in nature. Extremely high-pitched sounds created by invisible structures, which makes one think about all the vibrations emitted by the most unsuspectable objects we still know nothing about.