1 year ago
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The archetypal 25 seconds of a classical Christmas opus was inscribed into polymer movie utilizing the Nanofrazor 3D lithography system.
Physicists astatine the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) are bringing the Christmas cheer by utilizing a 3D nanolithography instrumentality called the Nanofrazor to chopped the smallest grounds ever. The tune they "recorded," successful afloat stereo nary less: the archetypal 25 seconds of "Rocking Around the Christmas Tree."
”I person done lithography for 30 years, and though we’ve had this instrumentality for a while, it inactive feels similar subject fiction," said Peter Bøggild, a physicist astatine DTU. "To get an thought of the standard we are moving at, we could constitute our signatures connected a reddish humor compartment with this thing. The astir extremist happening is that we tin make free-form 3D landscapes astatine that brainsick resolution.”
Back in 2015, the aforesaid DTU radical created a microscopic colour image of the Mona Lisa, immoderate 10,000 times smaller than Leonardo da Vinci's archetypal painting. To bash so, they created a nanoscale aboveground operation consisting of rows of columns, covered by a 20-nm heavy furniture of aluminum. How overmuch a file was deformed determined which colors of airy were reflected, and the deformation successful crook was determined by the strength of the pulsed laser beam. For instance, low-intensity pulses lone deformed the columns slightly, producing bluish and purple tones, portion beardown pulses importantly deformed the columns, producing orangish and yellowish tones. The resulting representation acceptable successful a abstraction smaller than the footprint taken up by a azygous pixel connected an iPhone Retina display.
Enlarge / In 2015, the DTU physics radical made a nanoscale Mona Lisa with a pixel size of 10 nanometers.
DTU Physics
The DTU physics radical acquired the Nanofrazor successful bid to sculpt precisely elaborate 3D nanostructures rapidly and comparatively cheaply. The Christmas grounds was simply a amusive vacation task for postdoc Nolan Lassaline to show the capableness of shaping a aboveground with nanoscale precision. Instead of adding worldly to a surface, the Nanofrazor precisely removes worldly to sculpt the aboveground into the desired signifier oregon shape—a benignant of gray-scale nanolithography.
"The Nanofrazor was enactment to enactment arsenic a record-cutting lathe—converting an audio awesome into a spiralled groove connected the aboveground of the medium," said Bøggild, who is besides an amateur instrumentalist and vinyl grounds enthusiast. "In this case, the mean is simply a antithetic polymer than vinyl. We adjacent encoded the euphony successful stereo—the lateral wriggles is the near channel, whereas the extent modulation contains the close channel. It whitethorn beryllium excessively impractical and costly to go a deed record. To work the groove, you request a alternatively costly atomic unit microscope oregon the Nanofrazor, but it is decidedly doable.”
The archetypal extremity is to usage the Nanofrazor to make caller kinds of magnetic sensors susceptible of detecting the currents successful surviving brains. Lassaline plans to make "quantum soap bubbles" successful graphene successful hopes of discovering caller ways of precisely manipulating the electrons successful that and different atomically bladed materials. “The information that we tin present accurately signifier the surfaces with nanoscale precision astatine beauteous overmuch the velocity of imaginativeness is simply a crippled changer for us," said DTU physicist Tim Booth. "We person galore ideas for what to bash adjacent and judge that this instrumentality volition importantly velocity up the prototyping of caller structures."
