Researchers at the University of Cincinnati have successfully developed a nano-antenna which transmits both AM and FM radio signals. Carbon nanotubes have already proven their special “abilities” and now the Cincinnati researchers have discovered new applications for this revolutionary material. Vesselin Shanov and Mark Schulz at the UC College of Engineering NanoWorld Lab noticed that by spinning CNTs into strong fibers, they can transmit radio signals.

The nano-antenna was created from a 25-micron CNT fiber, transparent tape, and silver paste, then the researchers replaced a cellphone’s antenna with the “nantenna”. According to Professor David Mast, from UC’s McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, the cellphone got four to five bars of signal using the nantenna that his fellow researchers created.

“It transmitted almost as well as the copper did, but at about one ten-thousandth of the weight. That was a very pleasant surprise, how easy it was to do. The hardest thing is to manipulate them. They float on ambient air” said Mast.

In order to test the “waves” of the signal, Mast decided to “set up a wireless webcam for the lab using these thread antennas.” His test was a success and “others” have seen “how well they work” and the results are so promising that they open the door for a series of new applications.

“They spin thread that is of such high quality, it opens the door to incredible possibilities. This is just one of many potential applications,” said Mast.

According to Schulz, the reason behind nano-antenna’s success was the so called “skin effect” as “the electrons transfer well because they want to go to the surface” and “instead of traveling through a bulk mass, they are traveling across a skin.”

Schulz was completed by Shanov who said that “copper wire is a bulk material” and “with carbon nanotubes, all the atoms are on the surface of these carbon structures and the tubes themselves are hollow, so the CNT thread is small and light.”

So why are these CNT threads so important and revolutionary in the same time? Well, according to Mast, “carbon thread that is a fraction of the weight of current copper conductors and antennas could directly apply and would be significant to aerospace activities – commercial, military and space. On any aircraft, there are about several hundred pounds of copper as cables and wiring.”

Although this study is only at the beginning, the promising results have drawn the attention of many companies and now the scientists are looking for one which is capable of providing funds to improve and commercialize CNT threads, and who knows, maybe in a few years copper wires will be replaced with carbon nanotube fibers because of their “immensely high tensile strength — perhaps five times that of steel and yet they are less dense than steel.” All we have to say is that we are really looking forward to it.

The tendency in electronic devices is all about getting smaller and smaller and smaller. It’s just the way these things need to be. However, they also have to be very efficient and we have nanotechnology and carbon nanotubes to make them like this. In order to develop smaller and more efficient electronics, scientists want to develop the next generation of devices based on carbon nanotubes using a technique called “chemical vapor deposition”, but it’s very hard to manipulate these structures and to bring them to a useful state.

A new vision is needed to complete the next-gen electronics and thanks to a breakthrough from scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, our future devices could be built from carbon nanotubes. The team of scientists led by professor Yongfeng Lu and postdoctoral researcher Yunshen Zhou, used a technique based on the so-called “optical near-field effects” and they managed to control the growth of carbon nanotubes. The researchers linked individually self-aligned carbon nanotubes with sharp-tipped electrodes, a process which is very different from previous techniques where the carbon nanotubes were manipulated after growth.

“With our method, there’s no requirement for expensive instrumentation and no requirement for tedious processes. It’s a one-step process. We call it ’self-aligning growth.’ The carbon nanotubes ‘know’ where to start growth. In previous efforts, they could only manipulate carbon nanotubes one piece at a time, so they had to align the carbon nanotubes one by one. For our approach using optical near-field effects, all locations with sharp tips can accommodate carbon nanotube growth. That means we can make multiple carbon nanotubes at a time and all of them will be self-aligned,” said professor Lu.

Although the researchers didn’t manage to generate millions of self-aligned carbon nanotubes, for the time being this is quite a breakthrough and you will have to take into consideration the fact that this is only the beginning therefore in a few years Lu and his team could develop and commercialize nanoscale devices like bio-sensors, photon-sensors, memory cells, or light-emitters.

“We have shown that we can use optical near-field effects to control growth for a small amount of carbon nanotubes. We want to make this process scalable so it can be used to make large numbers at a time so we can make a circuit or a system by this approach,” concluded professor Lu.