A RADIO transmitter no bigger than a bacterium could be made by coupling together an array of nanoscale magnets.
Shehzaad Kaka and colleagues at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, and Hitachi’s research lab in San Jose, California, experimented with nanoscale magnets whose fields oscillate in response to a small current. Two 40-nanometre magnets placed just 500 nanometres apart and tuned to roughly the same frequency were found to oscillate perfectly in time with one another.
The effect, known as phase locking, is akin to the way pendulums attached to the same support will…
