Posted on 07/09/2025 6:24:04 AM PDT by Red Badger
Enlargement of the silicon nitride membrane. The colors represent the measured motion of the membrane in the out of plane direction. Red means that part of the membrane moves upward, and blue means that part moves downwards. Credit: Albert Schliesser and Xiang Xi When a drummer hits a drum, the surface vibrates and creates sound—a signal we recognize as music. But once those vibrations stop, the signal disappears. Now imagine a drumhead that’s incredibly thin, only about 10 millimeters wide, and covered in tiny triangular holes. Scientists have created exactly that, and it does something extraordinary.
Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, working with teams from the University of Konstanz and ETH Zurich, discovered that vibrations can travel through this miniature membrane with barely any energy loss. In fact, the vibrations move more cleanly than signals in even the most advanced electronic circuits. This breakthrough, recently published in Nature, opens up new possibilities for how we transmit sound and information, especially in the race toward powerful new quantum technologies.
Phonons – Sound Signals or Vibrations That Spread Through a Solid Material Instead of using electricity, this research focuses on phonons—tiny vibrations that travel through solid materials. You can think of them as sound waves moving through a crystal or a drumhead. When atoms vibrate, they nudge neighboring atoms, creating a wave of motion that carries information.
If that wave weakens along the way or gets scrambled by heat or disorder, the message becomes more challenging—or impossible—to recover.
System Reliability is Crucial
What makes this new membrane so exciting is how little signal is lost. Researchers found that vibrations could move through it with extraordinary efficiency. In fact, the signal loss was almost nonexistent.
Even when the vibrations had to curve around holes in the membrane or change direction, only about one phonon out of a million went missing. That’s far better than what we see in electronic circuits, where signals typically weaken a hundred thousand times faster.
This level of precision could make the membrane a powerful new tool for transferring information in everything from quantum computers to high-precision sensors.
Basic Research with Perspectives
Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, Assistant Professor Xiang Xi and Professor Albert Schliesser, explain that the result should not be thought of in a specific, future application – but there are still rich possibilities. Currently, there is a global effort to build a quantum computer, which is dependent on super-precise transfer of signals between its different parts.
Another field within quantum research deals with sensors that, for example, can measure the smallest biological fluctuations in our own body – here too, signal transfer is crucial.
But Xiang Xi and Albert Schliesser are currently most interested in exploring the possibilities even further.
“Right now, we want to experiment with the method to see what we can do with it. For example, we want to build more complex structures and see how we can get phonons to move around them, or build structures where we get phonons to collide like cars at an intersection. This will give us a better understanding of what is ultimately possible and what new applications there are,” says Albert Schliesser. As they say: “Basic research is about producing new knowledge.”
Reference:
“A soft-clamped topological waveguide for phonons”
by Xiang Xi, Ilia Chernobrovkin, Jan Košata, Mads B. Kristensen, Eric Langman, Anders S. Sørensen, Oded Zilberberg and Albert Schliesser, 4 June 2025, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09092-x
> a signal we recognize as music.
Maybe. That depends on the drummer.
arm the phonon torpedos
Queue up the Drummer jokes!................
How do you get a drummer off of your porch?
Pay him 10 bucks for the pizza.
“But once those vibrations stop, the signal disappears. Now imagine a drumhead that’s incredibly thin, only about 10 millimeters wide”
I suspect present drum skins, and original drum skins from Africa are quite a bit less than 10mm thick.
(you know, you do not have to hire Leftists for technical publications...there is no law to that effect)
Huh? That’s a drumhead a centimeter thick. That would be the thickest drumhead ever made. It would be thicker than the chunkiest cell phone.
I suspect this is another case of a know-nothing “journalist” writing copy they don’t even proofread, about a subject they don’t understand.
I suspect they meant micrometers. I tried looking at the original article in “Nature”, but it’s a paywall site.
................
I was thinking the same, micrometers, but maybe nanometers, thought that’s quite thin!
Electric drum sets save marriages because they have a volume knob. LOL
Interesting. I wonder if there is a sound threshold above which is necessary for the phenomenon to occur. But it makes intuitive sense...a thinner membrane with less mass will conduct movement much farther along its path..(I think as a non physicist)
Good things:better sensors
Bad things: better sensors to spy on you.
I also wonder how often Autocorrect is involved. If you’re writing on any Apple device, it’s always lying in wait, just waiting to strike. I fight with it constantly, and frequently see it actually change correctly-typed words to entirely different words after the fact, based upon what it (mistakenly) believes is the context of the sentence. It’s really poorly designed.
Check this out:
https://thedaily.case.edu/cat-like-hearing-device-trillions-times-smaller-human-eardrum/
I saw that, too. Typical lack of attention to detail that is everywhere these days. Most college graduates can’t even spell, much less write coherent passages.
Or maybe it’s referring to the world’s smallest drum, made by whoever made the world’s smallest violin.
Yeah — it is describing research not a finished product.
I understood it fine but I am used to being abused by these editors and their poorly written articles. :-) AI should be an improvement in many cases.
If AI achieves nothing else but ending the epidemic of using an apostrophe before every “s”, especially in plural forms of words, it will have achieved a great victory for literacy.
I suspect the problem is with a reader. There is a difference between ‘wide’ and ‘thick’.
How do you know when a drummer is knocking on your door?
The knocking gets louder and faster!
Drummer here. I believe they meant mil. Drumhead thickness is measured in mil, which is one-thousandth of an inch. For example, the popular Remo Ambassador drumhead is 10 mil, or .01 inches thick.
I don ned kno editr to reveew my ritin.
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