Credit: © Lev DoLgatshjov/123RF

In 1901, the physicist Guglielmo Marconi sent the first transatlantic wireless signal carrying a message in Morse code. Fast-forward a century and experiments by two independent groups in California have put wireless technology back in the headlines again by making radios in which carbon nanotubes are central components, and in one lab, tuning the dial to Classic Rock.

Both designs rely on the inherently nonlinear electronic properties of carbon nanotubes. In a paper in Nano Letters with the title “Carbon nanotube radio” Chris Rutherglen and Peter Burke of the University of California, Irvine describe a radio receiver in which a semiconducting carbon nanotube acts mainly as the demodulator — the part of the radio that picks out the 'information' that is used to modulate the radio wave (Nano Lett. 7, 3296–3299; 2007). In a separate paper, “Nanotube radio”, Alex Zettl and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley showed that the nanotube can function as all four major components of the receiver — an antenna to pick up the incoming radio signal, a tuner that picks out one frequency from this signal, an amplifier and the demodulator (Nano Lett. 7, 3508–3511; 2007).

Both papers received widespread media attention, which raises the question: what is the role of packaging in modern science? For example, had the Berkeley paper been titled “Electrostatic deflections and electromechanical resonances of carbon nanotubes” — the title of a paper in the reference list that has been cited more than 500 times — and the nanotube radio played a series of dashes and dots rather than Eric Clapton, would the paper have generated so much media coverage? Time will tell whether the carbon nanotube radio truly has an impact on wireless communications. However, listening to an interview with Zettl on America's National Public Radio, it is not hard to imagine the excitement he and his students felt as the first sounds of a tinny version of Layla filled their lab.