Physicists on the Technical College of Denmark (DTU) are bringing the Christmas cheer by utilizing a 3D nanolithography software known as the Nanofrazor to chop the smallest document ever. The tune they “recorded,” in full stereo no much less: the primary 25 seconds of “Rocking Across the Christmas Tree.”

”I’ve accomplished lithography for 30 years, and though we’ve had this machine for some time, it nonetheless seems like science fiction,” stated Peter Bøggild, a physicist at DTU. “To get an thought of the dimensions we’re working at, we may write our signatures on a purple blood cell with this factor. Probably 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 colour picture of the Mona Lisa, some 10,000 instances smaller than Leonardo da Vinci’s authentic portray. To take action, they created a nanoscale floor construction consisting of rows of columns, lined by a 20-nm thick layer of aluminum. How a lot a column was deformed decided which colours of sunshine had been mirrored, and the deformation in flip was decided by the depth of the pulsed laser beam. As an illustration, 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.

The DTU physics group acquired the Nanofrazor with a purpose to sculpt exactly detailed 3D nanostructures shortly and comparatively cheaply. The Christmas document was merely a enjoyable vacation mission for postdoc Nolan Lassaline to show the aptitude of shaping a floor with nanoscale precision. As a substitute of including materials to a floor, the Nanofrazor exactly removes materials to sculpt the floor into the specified sample or form—a type 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,” stated Bøggild, who can be an newbie musician and vinyl document fanatic. “On this case, the medium is a distinct polymer than vinyl. We even encoded the music in stereo—the lateral wriggles is the left channel, whereas the depth modulation comprises the proper channel. It might be too impractical and costly to turn out to be a success document. To learn the groove, you want a slightly expensive atomic pressure microscope or the Nanofrazor, however it’s undoubtedly doable.”

The preliminary objective 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,” stated DTU physicist Tim Sales space. “We now have many concepts for what to do subsequent and imagine that this machine will considerably velocity up the prototyping of recent buildings.”