Posted: December 4, 2009 |
The world's smallest snowman |
(Nanowerk News) The folks at the at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London have made what surely must be the world's smallest sbowman:
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The snowman is made of two tiny tin beads, normally used to calibrate electron microscope lenses, which were welded together with platinum. (Image: Dr Cox, NPL)
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The snowman is 10 µm across, 1/5th the width of a human hair.
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The snowman was made from two tin beads used to calibrate electron microscope astigmatism. The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is under 1 µm wide, is ion beam deposited platinum.
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A nanomanipulation system was used to assemble the parts 'by hand' and platinum deposition was used to weld all elements together. The snowman is mounted on a silicon cantilever from an atomic force microscope whose sharp tip 'feels' surfaces creating topographic surveys at almost atomic scales.
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The techniques used to create the Nano scale snowman are employed by NPL:
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– To make and fine tune Atomic Force Microscope cantilevers for measuring surface topography.
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– To manufacture nano scale SQUIDs (Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices) for a wide range of future metrological applications including spintronics, single particle detection, NEMS and quantum information processing.
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– To measure magnetic properties of very small magnetic systems using quantum hall probes
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