Photo: Cross-sectional scanning electron micrograph image of vertically-grown silicon nanowires off of a silicon substrate. (courtesy the researchers)
Nanowired by David Pescovitz:
“We’re attacking three fundamental issues,” Yang says. “Can we make these building blocks of nanodevices? Can we identify and harness useful physical properties in them? And can we integrate them in parallel? Individual devices are fundamentally interesting. But more importantly, we need massive numbers of them to work together as one system.”
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The researchers demonstrated that minute voltages could control the flow of ions through the nanoscale plumbing system. In the future, the same technique might be used to shuttle proteins or pieces of DNA from a biological sample through the tubes in a lab-on-a-chip. Yang is currently developing a technique to conduct optical sensing within the nanofluidic channels so that the whole lab is self-contained in one device.
