Four racing teams from around the world will gather in France this spring to compete for a first-of-its-kind title.
Their vehicles will “inch” to the starting line and explode into motion to kick off a marathon 36-hour race that will have covered less than the width of a human hair by the time a victor is crowned. The vehicles participating in the race are custom-built tuners assembled out of a few hundred atoms by researchers, which are propelled across the surface of a gold disk by a stream of electrons. The NanoCarsRace is the brainchild of two French researchers with the French National Center for Scientific Research, and adds some high-octane thrills to the fairly serious discipline of manipulating particles on the atomic scale.
Running On Electron Power
Instead of fuel-injected V-8s, the nanocars will be propelled by a scanning tunneling microscope, a piece of precision equipment normally used to take pictures of individual atoms. The microscope works by bringing an extremely fine needle within a nanometer of a sample and then monitoring changes in the current of electrons traveling back and forth. The surge of electrons that the microscope takes advantage of can also be put to other purposes as well — propelling a tiny atomic car, in this case. The instrument used by the racers has been specially modified to control four different needles at once, allowing the cars to race side-by-side.
Four teams selected from six finalists will meet on April 28 in Toulouse to square off on a tiny chip of gold with a nanoscale racetrack etched into it. The vehicle designs range from the recognizably car-shaped American design to more abstract constructions, such as the windmill-inspired German submission and a roughly Y-shaped molecule for the Swiss team. Most designs have included molecular features that they say allow for turns, and a few even claim to feature fully functional wheels.
For more details: Animated Product Installation Video Examples
