You may hear references to playing the world’s smallest violin when someone is being overly whiny or wallowing in self-pity, and now scientists have turned the joke into an actual microscopic object.
Physicists at Loughborough University in the UK deployed the latest in nanolithography techniques – etching patterns into materials at the smallest possible scales – to create a violin drawing that’s just 13 microns wide. That’s thinner than a human hair, which are typically up to 180 microns in diameter.
This is essentially just a drawing rather than an instrument, and you would have to be a tiny tardigrade to play it anyway, but the novel creation demonstrates ways in which the next generation of electronic devices could be made.
“Once we understand how materials behave, we can start applying that knowledge to develop new technologies, whether it’s improving computing efficiency or finding new ways to harvest energy,” says experimental physicist Kelly Morrison, from Loughborough University.
“But first, we need to understand the fundamental science, and this system enables us to do just that.”
The violin was made through a four-step process. First, an incredibly fine, heated needle was used to draw the violin pattern into a chip coated with a polymer. Second, the part of the polymer that’s been written on is dissolved.
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The third stage is filling the newly formed cavity in the polymer with platinum, which is the material the violin is actually made from. The fourth and final step is removing the chip and the rest of the polymer, leaving behind the violin.
It’s not unlike the process of screen printing, where ink is pressed through a stencil to create a picture on the underlying layer – though in this case the scale is much, much smaller, and the equipment is much, much more sophisticated.
This is a seriously delicate process, and requires equipment that takes up a whole room. The setup includes a sculpting machine called a NanoFrazor, which is enclosed in a glove box to keep out dust and other particles.
“I’m really excited about the level of control and possibilities we have with the setup,” says Morrison. “I’m looking forward to seeing what I can achieve – but also what everyone else can do with the system.”
More ambitious research is now planned for the NanoFrazor and its connected software, work that will involve different materials and different methods of customizing them at the smallest possible scales. And any time that improvements in miniaturization are made, they have implications for technologies including computing.
For now, this is certainly the smallest violin that we’ve ever come across – continuing the tradition of the phrase thought to have first been popularized by a mention in the TV series M*A*S*H back in the 1970s.
“Though creating the world’s smallest violin may seem like fun and games, a lot of what we’ve learned in the process has actually laid the groundwork for the research we’re now undertaking,” says Morrison.
“Our nanolithography system allows us to design experiments that probe materials in different ways – using light, magnetism, or electricity – and observe their responses.”
