Researchers create the world’s smallest Christmas file

Measuring solely 40 micrometers in diameter, researchers at DTU Physics have made the smallest file ever minimize. That includes the primary 25 seconds of the Christmas basic “Rocking Across the Christmas Tree,” the only is minimize utilizing a brand new nano-sculpting machine—the Nanofrazor—not too long ago acquired from Heidelberg Devices.

The Nanofrazor can engrave 3D patterns into surfaces with nanoscale decision, permitting the researchers to create new nanostructures that will pave the best way for novel applied sciences in fields equivalent to quantum units, magnetic sensors and electron optics.

“I’ve carried out lithography for 30 years, and though we have had this machine for some time, it nonetheless looks like science fiction. We have carried out many experiments, like making a replica of the Mona Lisa in a 12 by 16-micrometer space with a pixel dimension of ten nanometers. We have additionally printed a picture of DTU’s founder—Hans Christian Ørsted—in an 8 by 12-micrometer dimension with a pixel dimension of two,540,000 DPI. To get an concept of the size we’re working at, we may write our signatures on a crimson blood cell with this factor,” says Professor Peter Bøggild from DTU Physics.

“Essentially the most radical factor is that we will create free-form 3D landscapes at that loopy decision—this gray-scale nanolithography is a real game-changer for our analysis.”

Nanoscale Christmas file, in stereo

The Nanofrazor just isn’t like a printer including materials to a medium; as an alternative, it really works like a CNC (laptop numerical management) machine eradicating materials at exact places, leaving the specified form behind. Within the case of the miniature footage of Mona Lisa and H.C. Ørsted, the ultimate picture is outlined by the line-by-line elimination of polymer till an ideal gray-scale picture emerges. To Peter Bøggild, an beginner musician and vinyl file fanatic, the thought of reducing a nanoscale file was apparent.

“We determined that we would as properly try to print a file. We have taken a snippet of ‘Rocking Round The Christmas Tree’ and have minimize it similar to you’ll minimize a traditional file—though, since we’re engaged on the nanoscale, this one is not playable in your common turntable. The Nanofrazor was put to work as a record-cutting lathe—changing an audio sign right into a spiraled groove on the floor of the medium. On this case, the medium is a special polymer than vinyl.

“We even encoded the music in stereo—the lateral wriggles is the left channel, whereas the depth modulation incorporates the appropriate channel. It might be too impractical and costly to develop into successful file. To learn the groove, you want a somewhat pricey atomic drive microscope or the Nanofrazor, however it’s positively doable.”

Excessive-speed, low-cost nanostructures

The NOVO Basis grant BIOMAG, which made the Nanofrazor dream doable, just isn’t about reducing Christmas data or printing photographs of well-known individuals. Peter Bøggild and his colleagues, Tim Sales space and Nolan Lassaline, produce other plans. They anticipate that the Nanofrazor will permit them to sculpt 3D nanostructures in extraordinarily exact element and accomplish that at excessive velocity and low value—one thing that’s unattainable with present instruments.

“We work with 2D supplies, and when these ultrathin supplies are fastidiously laid down on the 3D landscapes, they comply with the contours of the floor. In brief, they curve, and that could be a highly effective and completely new means of ‘programming’ supplies to do issues that nobody would imagine had been doable simply fifteen years in the past. As an illustration, when curved in simply the appropriate means, graphene behaves as if there’s a large magnetic subject when there may be, the truth is, none. And we will curve it simply the appropriate means with the Nanofrazor,” says Peter Bøggild.

Affiliate professor Tim Sales space provides, “The truth that we will now precisely form the surfaces with nanoscale precision at just about the velocity of creativeness is a sport changer for us. We’ve got many concepts for what to do subsequent and imagine that this machine will considerably velocity up the prototyping of recent buildings. Our most important aim is to develop novel magnetic sensors for detecting currents within the dwelling mind throughout the BIOMAG mission. Nonetheless, we additionally look ahead to creating exactly sculpted potential landscapes with which we will higher management electron waves. There’s a lot work to do.”

Postdoc Nolan Lassaline (who minimize the Christmas file) plans to create “quantum cleaning soap bubbles” in graphene. He’ll use the Nanofrazor to discover new methods of structuring nanomaterials and develop novel methods of manipulating electrons in atomically skinny supplies.

“Quantum cleaning soap bubbles are clean digital potentials the place we add artificially tailor-made issues. By doing so, we will manipulate how electrons move in graphene. We hope to grasp how electrons transfer in engineered disordered potentials and discover if this might develop into a brand new platform for superior neural networks and quantum info processing,” says Lassaline.

The Nanofrazor system is now a part of the DTU Physics NANOMADE’s distinctive fabrication facility for air-sensitive 2D supplies and units and a part of E-MAT, a better ecosystem for air-sensitive nanomaterials processing and fabrication led by Prof. Nini Pryds, DTU Vitality.