Carbon nanotubes could be the way we could transmit and receive large amounts of data wirelessly in the near future. Theoretically the new technology would make 3G and 4G look like ‘dial-up’ from bygone years. New research from Cornell University, led by Jiwoong Park, found that cylindrical rolled-up sheets of carbon atoms may make ideal optical scattering wires. They found that the nanotubes’ light transmission behaved as a scaled-down version of radio-frequency antennae found in walkie-talkies, except that they interact with light instead of radio waves. The principles that govern the interactions between light and the carbon nanotube are the same as between the radio antenna and the radio signal, they found. “Even if you chop it down to a small scale, nothing will change, because the scattering is fundamentally molecular,” said Park. To perform their experiments, the researchers used a methodology developed in their lab that completely eliminates the problematic background signal, by coating the surface of a substrate with a refractive index-matching medium to make the substrate “disappear” optically, not physically.
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