Carbon nanotube(CNT) has attracted much attention as one of the nanomaterials for future sensing devices because of their excellent properties. The mechanical vibration of an individual CNT has shown outstanding potential for detecting the force¹, mass², electromagnetic waves³ sensitively via CNT’s elastic and electric properties, chemical stability, and lightweight structure. In terms of communication field, some research groups have suggested the concept of the mechanical signal receiver consisted of CNT^3,4,. Although the previous studies have achieved to show the basic demonstration via the detection of electromagnetic signal, there have not been a research that quantitatively evaluates the communication performance and considers the effect of noise has been absent. In addition, it is significant to investigate the comprehensive systems include such CNT-based mechanical sensor.

Herein, we experimentally demonstrate for the first time that a CNT-based signal receiver can transfer a large amount of digital data, 393,216 bits, encoded from a color image⁵. Although there are some errors in bit decision from the received signal, we successfully decode the original digital image data by combining error collection. In addition, we experimentally evaluate the communication performance of the CNT-based mechanical receiver. The channel capacity obtained by the demonstration indicates that the data-transfer capability approaches the theoretical limitation. The results show that the nanoscale mechanical receiver has great potential for contributing to the incoming new technology relates our life, e.g., internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) by combining with information and communication technology.

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2) Moser, J. Guttinger, A. Eichker, M. J. Esplandiu, D. E. Liu, M. I. Dykman, A. Bachtold, Nature Nanotecnol., 8, 493 (2013).

3) Jensen, J. Weldon, H. Garcia, A. Zwttl, Nano Lett., 7, 3508 (2007).

4) Gouttenoire, T. Barois, S. Perisanu, J.-L. Leclercq, S. T. Purcell, P. Vincent, A. Ayari, Small, 6, 1060 (2010).

5)Funayama, H. Tanaka, J. Hirotani, K. Shimaoka, Y. Ohno, Y. Tadokoro, ACS Appl. Nano Mater., 10.1021/acsanm.1c02563 (2021).