http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/may/01/how-nanocrystals-squeeze-through-nanotubes
[snip] Researchers in the US have made a remarkable discovery about how an iron
nanocrystal moves through a carbon nanotube that does not have a uniform
diameter. They found that if the crystal meets a constriction in the tube, the
crystal reforms, atom by atom, to fit through the constriction, without
undergoing any melting or compression. According to the researchers, this
behaviour could have many applications in nanomechanics and could possibly be
used to synthesize small nanoparticles.
Scientists already knew that metallic nanocrystals can be made to travel
through carbon nanotubes (CNTs) if a current is applied to the tube. The
crystal moves in the direction of the electron flow and can easily be made to
move back and forth by switching the polarity of the current, while the speed
of the movement depends on the current magnitude. Indeed, this has been tested
with numerous metallic nanocrystals including copper, tungsten and gallium.
This is of particular interest to those developing nanoscale actuators or
memory devices, and for the removal of minute impurities from within the metal
crystal. Previously, most of the CNTs used to study this "electromigration"
were smooth and had a constant inner-diameter hollow core. But if for some
reason the CNT narrowed down at some point, such that the nanocrystal was now
bigger than the tube itself, it was assumed that the crystal would block the
tube until it melts and flows through as a liquid.
Slipping through
Surprisingly, what Sinisa Coh and colleagues from the University of California,
Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found was very different.
The metallic nanocrystals, while remaining solid and crystalline, somehow
managed to slip through the narrow passage while not being deformed. Rather,
the researchers found the crystal deconstructing and reforming within the
narrow passage, at the atomic scale. The team watched the movement of iron
nanocrystals with a high-resolution electron microscope. Electron diffraction
measurements verified that the crystals did not melt or experience compression.
...[/snip]
I propose the crystal is "contracting" in a Lorentzian like manner.. the
nanotubes 20nm nominal inner diameter is already in the active region for
Casimir effects.. we already know catalytic action occurs at opening and
defects in nano tubes from a paper by Peng Chen at Cornell. We also know that
catalytic action [think skeletal catalysts like Rayney nickel] is the result of
changes in Casimir geometry. What these gentleman are doing with their nano
crystals is equivalent to backfilling a cavity with another conductor.. if the
constriction is smaller than the crystal itself, then my posit is that the
inverse cube of the distance between the surfaces causes a huge but balanced
suppression of longer vacuum wavelengths...so much so that the difference in
wavelength populations relative to us outside the tube is on the same scale as
an observer on a near luminal space ship would perceive relative to us sitting
nearly stationary on earth. This article further convinces me that SR can also
be achieved through vacuum suppression with little cost for construction and no
need for exponential amounts of energy to spatially accelerate an object.
Fran
