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The primary 25 seconds of a traditional Christmas music was inscribed into polymer movie utilizing the Nanofrazor 3D lithography system.
Physicists on the Technical College of Denmark (DTU) are bringing the Christmas cheer through the use of a 3D nanolithography instrument referred to as the Nanofrazor to chop the smallest file ever. The tune they “recorded,” in full stereo no much less: the primary 25 seconds of “Rocking Across the Christmas Tree.”
”I’ve completed lithography for 30 years, and though we’ve had this machine for some time, it nonetheless appears like science fiction,” mentioned Peter Bøggild, a physicist at DTU. “To get an concept of the size we’re working at, we might write our signatures on a pink blood cell with this factor. Essentially the most radical factor is that we will create free-form 3D landscapes at that loopy decision.”
Again in 2015, the identical DTU group created a microscopic coloration picture of the Mona Lisa, some 10,000 occasions smaller than Leonardo da Vinci’s unique portray. To take action, they created a nanoscale floor construction consisting of rows of columns, coated by a 20-nm thick layer of aluminum. How a lot a column was deformed decided which colours of sunshine have been mirrored, and the deformation in flip was decided by the depth of the pulsed laser beam. As an example, low-intensity pulses solely deformed the columns barely, producing blue and purple tones, whereas sturdy pulses considerably deformed the columns, producing orange and yellow tones. The ensuing picture slot in an area smaller than the footprint taken up by a single pixel on an iPhone Retina show.
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Enlarge / In 2015, the DTU physics group made a nanoscale Mona Lisa with a pixel measurement of ten nanometers.DTU Physics
The DTU physics group acquired the Nanofrazor so as to sculpt exactly detailed 3D nanostructures rapidly and comparatively cheaply. The Christmas file was merely a enjoyable vacation undertaking for postdoc Nolan Lassaline to show the potential of shaping a floor with nanoscale precision. As an alternative of including materials to a floor, the Nanofrazor exactly removes materials to sculpt the floor into the specified sample or form—a form of gray-scale nanolithography.
“The Nanofrazor was put to work as a record-cutting lathe—changing an audio sign right into a spiralled groove on the floor of the medium,” mentioned Bøggild, who can be an newbie musician and vinyl file fanatic. “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 comprises the correct channel. It might be too impractical and costly to turn into successful file. To learn the groove, you want a relatively pricey atomic power microscope or the Nanofrazor, however it’s undoubtedly doable.”
The preliminary aim is to make use of the Nanofrazor to develop new sorts of magnetic sensors able to detecting the currents in dwelling brains. Lassaline plans to create “quantum cleaning soap bubbles” in graphene in hopes of discovering new methods of exactly manipulating the electrons in that and different atomically skinny supplies. “The truth that we will now precisely form the surfaces with nanoscale precision at just about the velocity of creativeness is a recreation changer for us,” mentioned DTU physicist Tim Sales space. “We have now many concepts for what to do subsequent and consider that this machine will considerably velocity up the prototyping of recent buildings.”
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