Danish physicists give the gift of world’s smallest Christmas record—in stereo

Physicists at the Technical University of Denmark are cutting the smallest record ever with the help of a 3D nanomaterials tool. They recorded the first 25 seconds of "Rocking Around the Christmas Tree" in stereo.

Although we have had the machine for a while, it still feels like science fiction according to Peter Bggild. We can use this thing to write our signatures on a red blood cell to get an idea of the scale we are working at. Free-form 3D landscapes can be created at that crazy resolution.

Some 10,000 times smaller than Leonardo da Vinci's original painting, the tiny color image of theMonaLisa was created by the same DTU group in 2015. They created a structure consisting of rows of columns covered in aluminum. The intensity of the laser beam was used to determine which colors of light were reflected. The blue and purple tones and orange and yellow tones were produced by low-intensity and strongpulses. The image fit in a smaller space than the one on the display.

Mona Lisa with a pixel size of ten nanometers.">

In order to sculpt precisely detailed 3D nanostructures quickly and cheaply, the DTU physics group acquired theNanofrazor. The Christmas record was a fun project for Nolan Lassaline to demonstrate the ability of shaping a surface with a small sample size. A kind of gray-scale nanolithography can be done with the removal of material from a surface.

Bggild said that the lathe was put to work as a record-cutting lathe, converting an audio signal into a spiralled grooves on the surface of the medium. The medium is a different type of plastic. The left and right channels of the music are in stereo. It may not be feasible to make a hit record. You need an expensive microscope to read the grooves, but it's doable.

The goal is to develop magnetic sensors that can detect the currents in the brain. Lassaline plans to create "quantum soap bubbles" in Graphene in hopes of finding new ways of manipulating the electrons in that and other atomically thin materials. We believe that this machine will speed up the creation of new structures, and we have many ideas for what to do next.