Two physicists in the US have made a motion sensor that can detect movements as small as a thousandth of a nanometre. The sensor combines a nanoelectromechanical bridge and a single-electron transistor, and could be used in applications where ultrahigh precision is essential, such as magnetic resonance microscopy. And if the sensitivity of the device could be improved by a factor of 100 it would be possible to detect quantum effects in a macroscopic system (R Knobel and A Cleland 2003 Nature 424 291) .
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