Super-sensitive single-atom detectors are the latest brainchild of researchers working with single-walled carbon nanotubes.
Anne Goodsell and her co-workers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, harnessed one of the tubes' many unusual properties: their ability to create a powerful electric field when charged. The researchers suspended a 10-micrometre-long nanotube between two electrodes and charged it to hundreds of volts. They then fired a beam of cold rubidium atoms at the tube. Atoms spiralled quickly around the tube until an electron jumped from a neutral atom to the positively charged tube. Once ionized, the atom was repelled by the tube, and shot out at high speed into a nearby detector.
The team believes that the technique could be useful as an atom 'sniffer' or counter.
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Nanotechnology: Down the tube. Nature 464, 960 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/464960c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/464960c