5 days ago
World's smallest violin fits inside human hair
It's a project unlikely to elicit much sympathy, but physicists at Loughborough University have laboured to create the world's smallest violin.
The tiny instrument, which can only be seen under a microscope, has been etched in platinum using nanotechnology, and is significantly slimmer than a human hair.
It was created to test and demonstrate the capabilities of the university's new nanolithography system, which can build and study the tiniest structures to see how materials behave at the smallest scale.
'Though creating the world's smallest violin may seem like fun and games, a lot of what we've learnt in the process has actually laid the groundwork for the research we're now undertaking,' said Prof Kelly Morrison, head of the physics department and an expert in experimental physics.
'People are always looking for something that runs faster, better, more efficiently, that requires continuing to find a way to scale down. As it gets harder to make things smaller, we now need different ways of approaching that.'
The team chose to create the miniscule musical instrument in homage to the phrase 'the world's smallest violin', which is often employed sarcastically to imply a perceived problem is trivial and unworthy of concern.
The expression is thought to have first emerged in the 1970s, and was popularised by the US television series M*A*S*H.
The violin is a microscopic image rather than a playable instrument, and it has not yet been confirmed by any official channels as the world's smallest violin. However, it is unlikely there is any instrument smaller. It measures just 35 microns long and 13 microns wide, with a micron being one millionth of a metre. A human hair typically ranges from 17 to 180 microns in diameter.
The violin was made using a technique called thermal scanning probe lithography, in which a heated, needle-like tip burns away highly precise patterns at nanoscale.
It works similar to screen printing on a T-shirt where colour is squeezed through a stencil to leave the design behind.
The team began by coating a small chip with a gel-like material, then used the heated tip to burn the pattern of the violin into the surface layer to create a violin-shaped cavity.
A thin layer of platinum was then deposited onto the chip and the rest of the gel removed, to leave behind the violin in a process that takes around three hours.
The finished piece is no larger than a speck of dust on the chip and can only be viewed in detail using a microscope. It's even smaller than a tardigrade – the microscopic, eight-legged micro-animals.
Dr Naemi Leo, a research technician at Loughborough, said: 'Another comparison we can make is the size of the violin is the size of a tardigrade or small water bear, and they have a size of about 50 to 1,200 microns, so if you had a small tardigrade they might be able to play the violin.'
Prof Morrison added: 'I'm really excited about the level of control and possibilities we have with the set-up.
'I'm looking forward to seeing what I can achieve – but also what everyone else can do with the system.'
The team is also looking into whether the system can offer an alternative to magnetic data storage and computing technologies.
