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Friday, December 24, 2010

World's smallest Christmas card in nanotech

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk


Researchers at the University of Glasgow have built what they claim is the world's smallest Christmas card etched on a piece of glass. 
"We decided that producing this Christmas card was a simple way to show just how accurate our technology is," said Professor David Cumming of the School of Engineering. "The process to manufacture the card only took 30 minutes. It was very straightforward to produce as the process is highly repeatable – the design of the card took far longer than the production of the card itself.
"The card is 200 micro-metres wide by 290 micro-metres tall. To put that into some sort of perspective, a micro-metre is a millionth of a metre; the width of a human hair is about 100 micro-metres. You could fit over half a million of them onto a standard A5 Christmas card – but signing them would prove to be a bit of a challenge."
The process used was plasmon resonance in a patterned aluminium film made in the University's James Watt Nanofabrication Centre.



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