According to Popular Mechanics Magazine, an amplifier has been built using a single soccer-ball shaped carbon 60 Buckyball molecule (shown below).  Research in this area was performed by scientists at IBM's Research Laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland.

The report states that several years ago, scientists learned that the amount of current that was conducted by the buckyball could be altered by squeezing using the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (referred to as a STM).

To complete their studies and create an amplifier, researchers positioned a STM tip on a buckyball placed on a copper surface.  The tip of the STM was gently lowered, squeezing the buckyball one-tenth of one-millionth of a millimeter.  As soon as the molecule was deformed by the pressure, a 10mV current was applied to the tip of the STM producing a fivefold voltage gain!

This research has excited many scientists, but researchers contend that it may be several years before the circuit can be used in applications such as transistors in information-storage devices.

The next step for the buckyball STM research is to replace the STM tip with a nanoscopic component.  This nanoscopic component would reduce the size of the electromechanical amplifier to less than 1 micrometer (1 x 10^-6 m)!!

    

  HOME