Physicists at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) are bringing Christmas cheer by using a 3D nanolithography tool called Nanofrazor to break the smallest record ever. The song they “recorded”, nothing less in stereo: the first 25 seconds of “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree”.
“I’ve been doing lithography for 30 years, and although we’ve had this machine for a while, it still feels like science fiction,” said DTU physicist Peter Bøggild. “To get an idea of the scale we’re working on, we might write our signatures on a red blood cell with this thing. The most radical thing is that we can create freeform 3D landscapes at this crazy resolution.
In 2015, the same DTU group created a microscopic color image of the Mona Lisa, regarding 10,000 times smaller than Leonardo da Vinci’s original painting. To do this, they created a nanoscale surface structure made up of rows of columns, covered with a 20 nm thick layer of aluminium. The degree of distortion of a column determined which colors of light were reflected, and the distortion in turn was determined by the intensity of the pulsed laser beam. For example, low intensity pulses only slightly distorted the columns, producing blue and purple tones, while strong pulses greatly distorted the columns, producing orange and yellow tones. The resulting image fits in a space smaller than the footprint occupied by a single pixel on an iPhone Retina display.
The initial goal is to use the Nanofrazor to develop new types of magnetic sensors capable of detecting currents in living brains. Lassaline plans to create “quantum soap bubbles” in graphene in hopes of discovering new ways to precisely manipulate electrons in this and other atomically thin materials. “The fact that we can now precisely shape surfaces with nanoscale precision at nearly the speed of the imagination is a game-changer for us,” said DTU physicist Tim Booth. “We have many ideas of what to do next and we believe this machine will significantly speed up the prototyping of new structures.”