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IBM and National Geographic Create the World's Smallest Magazine Cover
This nanoscale version of the cover of National Geographic Kids measures 11 by 14 thousandths of a millimetre.
Photograph: National Geographic
IBM and National Geographic Kids Unveil GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS® Title for the World's Smallest Magazine Cover Made with a Microscopic 3D Printer:
To create the record-setting cover, IBM scientists invented a tiny "chisel" with a heatable silicon tip 100,000 times smaller than a sharpened pencil point. Using this nano-sized tip, which creates patterns and structures on a microscopic scale, it took scientists just 10 minutes and 40 seconds to etch the magazine cover onto a polymer, the same substance of which plastics are made. The resulting magazine cover measures 11 × 14 micrometers, which is so small that 2,000 could fit on a grain of salt.
To select which cover to shrink, National Geographic Kids turned to its readers to vote online for their favorite design. The March 2014 cover that earned the most votes as well as a microscopic version, visible through a ZEISS Axio Imager 2 microscope, was unveiled at the USA Science & Engineering Festival. It will be on display at the National Geographic Kids and IBM booth #3728 on April 26 and 27.
"National Geographic Kids magazine subscribers loved this cover, so it makes sense that a broader audience would vote it as their favorite of 2014 as well. And by helping to set this Guinness World Records title, they're learning about science while having fun, which is what Kids is all about," said Rachel Buchholz, vice president and editor of National Geographic Kids.
<snip>
How IBM researchers created the cover
The nanometer-sized tip, which can be heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit), is attached to a bendable cantilever that controllably scans the surface of the substrate material, in this case a polymer invented by chemists at IBM Research in Almaden, California, with the accuracy of one nanometer—one millionth of a millimeter. By applying heat and force, the tip can remove substrate material based on predefined patterns, thus operating like a "nanomilling" machine or a 3D printer with ultrahigh precision. Additional material can be removed to create complex 3D structures with nanometer precision by modulating the force or by readdressing individual spots.
This new capability may impact the prototyping of new transistor devices, including tunneling field effect transistors, for more energy-efficient and faster electronics for anything from cloud data centers to smartphones. By the end of the year IBM hopes to begin exploring the use of this technology to prototype transistor designs made of graphene like materials.
To select which cover to shrink, National Geographic Kids turned to its readers to vote online for their favorite design. The March 2014 cover that earned the most votes as well as a microscopic version, visible through a ZEISS Axio Imager 2 microscope, was unveiled at the USA Science & Engineering Festival. It will be on display at the National Geographic Kids and IBM booth #3728 on April 26 and 27.
"National Geographic Kids magazine subscribers loved this cover, so it makes sense that a broader audience would vote it as their favorite of 2014 as well. And by helping to set this Guinness World Records title, they're learning about science while having fun, which is what Kids is all about," said Rachel Buchholz, vice president and editor of National Geographic Kids.
<snip>
How IBM researchers created the cover
The nanometer-sized tip, which can be heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit), is attached to a bendable cantilever that controllably scans the surface of the substrate material, in this case a polymer invented by chemists at IBM Research in Almaden, California, with the accuracy of one nanometer—one millionth of a millimeter. By applying heat and force, the tip can remove substrate material based on predefined patterns, thus operating like a "nanomilling" machine or a 3D printer with ultrahigh precision. Additional material can be removed to create complex 3D structures with nanometer precision by modulating the force or by readdressing individual spots.
This new capability may impact the prototyping of new transistor devices, including tunneling field effect transistors, for more energy-efficient and faster electronics for anything from cloud data centers to smartphones. By the end of the year IBM hopes to begin exploring the use of this technology to prototype transistor designs made of graphene like materials.
More technical info at the link.
And here's a video describing the process:
Very cool.
H
