Future phones and laptops could have speakers made of carbon nanotubes
Wednesday, October 9, 2013 - 11:00
in Physics & Chemistry
(Phys.org) —For the past year, researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing have been listening to music on a laptop through a pair of unusual earphones. Although the earphones look ordinary, they do not contain the typical metal coil speaker found in most earphones, but rather a chip made of many string-like carbon nanotube (CNT) yarns with grooves etched in them. Because they are easy to fabricate, operate on 60 mW of power, and provide clear sound quality, the CNT-based chips could be used as components in a wide variety of speakers, including those found in cell phones and laptops.