Composing molecular music with carbon
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Research Letters
Composing molecular music with carbon Ashley J. Kocsis and Steven W. Cranford, Laboratory of Nanotechnology in Civil Engineering (NICE), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115 Address all correspondence to Steven W. Cranford at [email protected] (Received 3 December 2014; accepted 18 February 2015)
Abstract What musical notes can a molecule play? Carbyne is a chain of atoms that vibrates similar to an elastic string. Like the tuning of a guitar string, this vibration can be predicted based on length and tension. Using atomistic simulation, we determine the vibrational response of carbyne. We further produce audible notes, enabling specific musical composition with prescribed molecular conditions (pre-strain and length) and combine single chains into multi-chain systems to form molecular chords. Since the tension of a molecular chain is relatively low ( 0.951). Next, we inspect the effect of length by grouping the chains of varying length when subject to the same strain/ tension. The square of the frequency is plotted against L−1 for varying strain values of 0%–8% [see Fig. 2(c)]. These values again demonstrate direct proportionality due to the close linear fit demonstrated by a high coefficient of determination (R2 > 0.968). Owing to these relationships, we concluded carbyne can be accurately modeled as a vibrating string, akin to a “stretched” guitar string. Finally, we use the displacement-time output of our simulations to produce audible tones and simulated “molecular music”. Each displacement history can be thought of as representing a sound wave. Upon scaling to audible octaves, the signal can easily be output as an audio file for individual notes (see Supplementary Audio Files #1–#12) or a scale (see Supplementary Audio File #13), or combined for a short melody (see Supplementary Audio File #14).
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0.48 0.36 0.12 0.0 1.0 0.85 Å/Å ×10−2 Strain value (ε)
1.09
1.46
2.06
5.21
10.5
1.33
44 44 44 44 65 88 Å Chain length (L)
88
88
88
88
88
65
530 508 464 438 398 280 GHz Scaled frequency ( f )
296
314
332
352
368
420
493.9 466.2 440 415.4 369.9 Hz Standard frequency
261.6
277.1
293.6
311.2
329.6
349.3
392.0
B A# A G# G F# F C
C#
D
D#
E
Musical note Units Parameter
Table I. Musical Scale (C major scale; standard pitch of A = 440 Hz) and frequency values as a result of the MD simulations involving carbyne chains of length, L = 44, 65, and 88 Å with varying strain values. Note: shaded values not standard notes in C major scale.
Sensitivity and sensing resolution
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The last decade has produced a variety of activities in the measurement of small forces, which has become a demand of nanotechnology. At small scales, forces can only be detected indirectly using basic physics principles, which are key to nanoscale designs. This work can have significant impact on the development of nanoscale devices, for dete
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