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Flow-driven rotary motors drive functional processes in human society such as windmills and water wheels. Although examples of such rotary motors also feature prominently in cell biology, their synthetic construction at the nanoscale has…
Rotary motors play key roles in energy transduction, from macroscale windmills to nanoscale turbines such as ATP synthase in cells. Despite our capabilities to construct engines at many scales, developing functional synthetic turbines at…
DNA nanostructures are made using synthetic DNA strands, the sequences of which are designed such that they will self-assemble into the desired form by hybridization of complementary domains. Various structures and devices have been…
A rotary nanomotor made of carbon nanostructures is introduced here. Through a rotationally symmetrical layout of diamond wedges (or needles) outside of a carbon nanotube and with the [100] direction of diamond along the tube's axial…
In living systems, DNA undergoes continuous and rhythmic mechanical remodeling through condensation, looping, and disentangling to regulate gene expression, segregate chromosomes, and guide morphogenesis. Here, we demonstrate a purely…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, we propose a novel nanoscale watermill for unidirectional transport of water molecules through a curved single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT). In this nanoscale system, a revolving charge is introduced…
A fundamental design rule that nature has developed for biological machines is the intimate correlation between motion and function. One class of biological machines is molecular motors in living cells, which directly convert chemical…
We report a versatile method for executing controllable high-speed rotation of nanowires by AC voltages applied to multiple electrodes. The rotation of the nanowires can be instantly switched on or off with precisely controlled rotation…
Synthetic molecular motors are an appealing means to control motion at the nanoscale, but understanding their behaviour as single-molecule actuators and integrating them into larger, functional systems remain technical challenges.…
Self-propelling bacteria are a dream of nano-technology. These unicellular organisms are not just capable of living and reproducing, but they can swim very efficiently, sense the environment and look for food, all packaged in a body…
We have micromachined a silicon-chip device that transports DNA with a Brownian ratchet that rectifies the Brownian motion of microscopic particles. Transport properties for a DNA 50mer agree with theoretical predictions, and the DNA…
The control over DNA elongation in nanofluidic devices holds great potential for large-scale genomic analysis. So far, the manipulation of DNA in nanochannels has been mostly carried out with electrophoresis and seldom with hydrodynamics,…
Nanoscale resonators that oscillate at high frequencies are useful in many measurement applications. We studied a high-quality mechanical resonator made from a suspended carbon nanotube driven into motion by applying a periodic radio…
We here examine the nonlinear dynamics of artificial homogeneous DNA chain relying on the plain-base rotator model. It is shown that such dynamics can exhibit kink and antikink solitons of sine-Gordon type. In that respect we propose…
DNA helicases are molecular motors that use the energy from ATP hydrolysis to move along DNA, promoting the unwinding or rewinding of the double helix. Here, we use magnetic and optical tweezers to track the motion of three helicases, gp41,…
Low-cost coin vibrational motors, used in haptic feedback, exhibit rotational internal motion inside a rigid case. Because the motor case motion exhibits rotational symmetry, when placed into a fluid such as glycerin, the motor does not…
Efficient capture and detection of minute amount of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules are pivotal for an array of modern gene technologies which are widely utilized in medical, forensic and defense applications, including DNA…
One of the fundamental challenges in nanophotonics is to gain full control over nanoscale optical elements. The precise spatiotemporal arrangement determines their interactions and collective behavior. To this end, DNA nanotechnology is…
Genetic information is stored in a linear sequence of base-pairs; however, thermal fluctuations and complex DNA conformations such as folds and loops make it challenging to order genomic material for in vitro analysis. In this work, we…
We study, both experimentally and by numerical modeling, the magnetic dynamics that can be excited in a magnetic thin-film nanopillar device using the spin torque from a spatially localized current injected via a 10s-of-nm-diameter…