The NINT Molecular Clipping Overdrive Prototype

[sylnau]

Sound great!!

[Sparrow]

Hey Doc !! that was Excellent
Sounds Great.
thanks for sharing!

[Ryan]

Quite a tale of quantum physics and guitar pedals hey guys! Thanks for checking it out!

Honestly, I still can't believe we got to make a prototype for a science lab.. I just can't get over it, that's pretty much all I ever wanted out of a career. *soldering iron drop*

Welcome Dr Adam!

What other applications are you looking at apart from the obvious answer of MORE FUZZ!?

In principle, we want to pursue any application where molecular electronics can provide functions that are difficult or not possible with conventional components. We are always looking for new applications! Sorry the answer is so open-ended, but that is the nature of research. It can take unexpected turns at any moment (kind of like generating harmonics using the non-linearity inherent in quantum tunneling junctions!).

The guitar pedal application was a bit of a surprise to the higher-ups maybe, hey Adam?

Also, just stumbled upon this today..... I thought this might be of interest here, as it mentions a far-out theory to explain tunneling barriers:

http://www.nature.com/news/a-quantum-wo ... es-1.16213

I love stuff like this. So Adam, do you think that particle sciences will lead to an ultimate understanding of our universe and reality? I'm gonna say yes, yes they will. And do you think that Many Worlds hypothesis is a valid explanation of quantum mysteries? Or are there no quantum mysteries, it's just formulas that civilians can't comprehend so it lends an air of mystery to it all?

Another question Adam, do you think the smallest particles of existence are now known, quarks and leptons, and that's it, no smaller? Or do you think there'll be another round of discoveries beneath?

Adam's a professor too, he won't mind answering all of our questions on the nature of the universe and reality! *big smile*

Maybe you could show a pic of the laptop in your lab that's processing a signal through the junctions and counting the cycles? Neat display! Or that big machine that puts the conductor on the substrate, you know these guys like gear!

Hi all- just a very quick preview for now..... Nick's demo will be better and available soon, but for now, here's this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HhMUYW7A4g[/youtube]

Please forgive my playing- this was really meant to get across the sound to the project team before we settled on a finalized circuit. Nick's demo will be much better, both at explaining the technology and at showing how they sound with a real player!

Thanks!

I think that's great playing too, Doc! See the SD-1 on the side there.. an SD-1 with a molecular junction in it.. muchly improved.. gonna be a whole industry around taking the old diodes out of pedals and putting junctions in them!

Thanks for having a read through this, guys! There's going to be a really informative and demonstrative video by JustNick soon and from there we'll keep you posted!

Also, something very cool about quantum tunneling.. that's how the sun works! Distortion pedals and stars, what a time to be alive.

[jrmy]

Distortion pedals and stars, what a time to be alive.

Now that right there is a song lyric!

Thanks for the mini-demo, Adam - it was totally great for getting across some of the essential sounds. And no worries on the playing - it sounded fine, and you were instrumental in building a MOLECULAR CLIPPING OVERDRIVE PEDAL FROM THE FUTURE. Your street cred is 100% safe around here.

I'm curious about a couple of things: what's up with the three upside-down Doc Sci pedals we glimpse in the upper right hand corner of the video? More science-y collaborations?

Secondly, I'd be interested in hearing some more on the "tunability" of these junctions, such as potential applications to extended-range instruments (here on ILF, the phrase "But how does it sound on bass?" comes up for just about every fuzz demo). And can these sorts of technologies be used for uniquely novel or unpredictable distortion sounds?

[goroth]

Cool demo docs!

[Ryan]

Haha yeah Adam's street cred is pretty solid isn't it!

There's just a few Elements on my bench that I was working on at the time before they came out.. I should have cleared those off, they didn't need to be there.

I made the prototype full frequency range so it can be experimented on with any instruments, it doesn't care what frequencies go through it. I'm curious too about how far the junctions can go, how saturated, how weird sounding.. these kinds of experiments probably have to happen after the various production processes are sorted out. First you have to consistently make regular junctions, that's been the focus for a long time, then will come experimenting to see what other sounds can be made.. I'm excited for that too!

[UnicornTrap]

That is really awesome! Thanks for the demo because I was very curious what it sounds like. loved the op-amp with the silicon diode

[ajbergren]

First, thanks all for the kind words!!

]The guitar pedal application was a bit of a surprise to the higher-ups maybe, hey Adam?

That is an understatement, but I have to say that they are pretty excited about this now! A few of them turned out to be guitar players, and are even evaluating the prototype!

I love stuff like this. So Adam, do you think that particle sciences will lead to an ultimate understanding of our universe and reality? I'm gonna say yes, yes they will. And do you think that Many Worlds hypothesis is a valid explanation of quantum mysteries? Or are there no quantum mysteries, it's just formulas that civilians can't comprehend so it lends an air of mystery to it all?

I would agree that science can provide a lot of answers, but the questions must be framed in a testable manner. That is the difficulty about some of this stuff, doing experiments that can answer some of these questions. This is what I love about science- designing experiments that will ultimately answer a question. There is a lot of creativity involved here, and this is my favourite part of my job! Certainly there will always be mysteries, but I don't think it always needs to be beyond comprehension- that is another challenge in science, communicating it to the public in a meaningful way. I have to say, Nick's demo and description should go a long way to explaining what this guitar pedal is all about in a very understandable way!!! Can't wait until that is out (it will be soon!)!

Another question Adam, do you think the smallest particles of existence are now known, quarks and leptons, and that's it, no smaller? Or do you think there'll be another round of discoveries beneath?

If you are interested in these concepts, you should look up the Planck length (Google it!)- that is the smallest dimension that holds any physical meaning. And it is far smaller than electrons! But the Planck length is the smallest distance that ever could hold any physical meaning- two entities (should they exist at all) separated by a distance smaller than the Planck length would technically be occupying the same space. Pretty cool concept!

If you are interested in this sort of thing, please also Google the fine structure constant, which is approximately equal to 1/137, and was once thought to be related to the number of particles in the universe!

Getting back in a round about way to the multi-verse theory, it is interesting to think about, but currently of limited value since we don't yet have ways of testing such a theory- perhaps we will someday, but for now, a bit of a mystery!

Maybe you could show a pic of the laptop in your lab that's processing a signal through the junctions and counting the cycles? Neat display! Or that big machine that puts the conductor on the substrate, you know these guys like gear!

I'll work on this! We had intended to put this on the web somehow, and the current junction has reached 33 million cycles to plus/minus 1 volt since late July- no signs of slowing down! For the other equipment, I'll see what I can come up with!

That is really awesome! Thanks for the demo because I was very curious what it sounds like. loved the op-amp with the silicon diode

No problem! The opamp with diodes is pretty cool, but my favourite is the NPN stage with junction #2- just has a really cool sound! But this illustrates exactly part of the point of doing this- providing another set of sounds for people to enjoy. There is also a second element, though- this technology is protected such that cloning issues are mitigated and I hope that new innovations are supported!!

In any case, I can't wait until Nick's demo is out- it is looking really great!!

[Tristan]

Really cool to hear a demo, I agree, I loved that junction 2 as well (especially with the Op-Amp and the NPN), it's a bit like a mix of the clarity and punch of the silicon diodes with a buzzy crackle behind it, multi-layered in a sense, really dig it!

Adam, I don't want to derail the topic but I've been interested in Quantum Mechanics for a pretty long time only I don't seem to really grasp it, it's all still quite abstract to me, could you recommend me good books / scientists / video's I could check to develop more of an understanding of it?
I was watching some of those Leonard Susskind (Stanford) video's on youtube but I kinda got lost and there's also just so many of those.

[ajbergren]

The best source I know if is Richard Feynman's lectures on Physics, Vol. III:
http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_toc.html

Not sure if you've seen these before, but it is the go to source for the most part.

Also, I would like to clarify:
My "formal" training is in chemistry (undergraduate) and then Analytical Chemistry (graduate). What I love about nanotechnology is that it is so multi-disciplinary, that it has allowed me to pursue concepts involved in physics, chemistry, materials science, electronic principles, device packaging, nanoscale fabrication, and many other interesting areas all at the same time. No need to limit anything to a discipline- let's do interesting things because they are cool, and we can harness the properties of matter at the nanoscale (which often become non-linear and size dependent) to do all sorts of great things!

[Chankgeez]

]The guitar pedal application was a bit of a surprise to the higher-ups maybe, hey Adam?

That is an understatement, but I have to say that they are pretty excited about this now! A few of them turned out to be guitar players, and are even evaluating the prototype!

That's totally awesome.

(We need a "science" smiley here.)

[ajbergren]

Maybe you could show a pic of the laptop in your lab that's processing a signal through the junctions and counting the cycles? Neat display! Or that big machine that puts the conductor on the substrate, you know these guys like gear!

Okay, here is a snapshot from the continuous cycling experiment that has been running since approx. July. What is happening is that an instrument is cycling the voltage from -1 to +1 V over and over, and then plotting the resulting current-voltage curve relative to the first one. Here, I caught it mid-cycle, so you can see the part that is black and red on the left side. Also, it was restarted recently in order to download the data for analysis (it collects all of those curves), so in the lower left corner, it says that prior to the current set, it had already run 30 million cycles. [apologies for the low quality picture here!]


Here is a picture of me at a low temperature electronic probe station. This lets us test the electronic properties of various things all the way from 4 degrees Kelvin (that's liquid He temperature, or 4 degrees above absolute zero!!!) all the way to 450 K (which is 177 degrees C).


Here is an electron beam evaporator, which uses a high voltage (8,000 V) beam of electrons to heat up materials until they sublime or melt, coating whatever gets loaded into the vacuum chamber. It is interesting to note here that the high voltage power supply uses a vacuum tube (a tetrode!) to generate the high V- I actually bought some NOS winged C versions for this for back up, believe it or not!


Here is some electronic testing equipment. The bottom instrument is a lock-in amplifier, which lets us see very small currents at particular reference frequencies. We use this to measure the very small photocurrent that results when molecular junctions are illuminated with light (picoamps!):


Finally, here are some "lasers" which can output beams of visible light- Argon ion and Krypton ion lasers are shown here (there are two tubes shown for each different laser). We used these mainly to measure the spectrum of molecules on surfaces (using something called Raman spectroscopy). Essentially, light is scattered in a particular way based on how the atoms that make up the individual molecules vibrate. Think of each chemical bond having a particular vibrational frequency, such that the scattering spectrum contains peaks that have information about the chemical structure of the molecules. This means we can see very thin (a few molecules thick) layers of the molecules on the surface!


Well, that's all I have to share for now, hope to have more latter- along with Nick's Demo!!!

[phantasmagorovich]

Wow, that is a whole new level of gear porn!

[Tristan]

phanta ^

Thanks for the tip Adam, I'll definitely look into that!

[ajbergren]

Check it out!!!


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EJIihaLV9g[/youtube]