Ring my string: Building silicon nano-strings

Researchers at EPFL, led by Professor Tobias J. Kippenberg, have now made a simple observation about crystal oscillators, which are ubiquitously used in electronic devices and are known to possess extremely small mechanical energy loss at low temperature. The researchers proved that, if a crystalline material with nanoscale thickness is stretched with high tension and retains its atomic order, it would be a good candidate for making strings with long-lived acoustic vibrations. The study is published in Nature Physics.