FIG. 1: (Color online) Schematic representation of a nanodevice used to allow starting and con- trolling a CNT oscillator. The device is suspended between two contacts and it is composed by a X-like junction, which serves as support and also provides the outer tube of the oscillator, and an inner moveable tube. models and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. For the analytical part we considered a simplified model where the motion of the inner tube of mass m , represented by the center of mass coordinate x , is described by the following equation of a non-linear, damped, driven oscillator where F is the restoring force due to van der Waals interactions between inner and outer tubes, the damped term is associated with a friction proportional to | ˙ x | 2 (Ref. 11), with a damped coefficient γ . The effect of the heating caused by the electrical current is translated into a driven “thermal” force which is proportional to the thermal gradient dT/dx . This model takes into account only the translational motion considering all tubes rigid, discarding rotational and vibrational modes. Despite the existence of these effects in real situations, the simplified analysis of the translational motion allows a fast estimative of the relative im- portance and contributions of geometrical (tube lengths and diameters, etc.) and dynamical aspects (temperature, damping constants, etc.) that can be obtained by numerical integra- tion of Eq. (1). These analysis are combined with classical MD simulations based on the m ¨ x − F ( x ) + γ sgn( ˙ x ) | ˙ x | 2 = α dT dx p ( t ) . (1) 3