National Geographic Kids has claimed its ninth Guinness World Records title for the Smallest Magazine Cover, using patented technology from IBM, at the US Science & Engineering Festival in Washington.
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 micrometres, 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 favourite design, and the March 2014 cover was selected.
“National Geographic Kids magazine subscribers loved this cover, so it makes sense that a broader audience would vote it as their favourite 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,” says Rachel Buchholz, vice-president and editor of National Geographic Kids.
To create the cover, the nanometre-sized tip, which can be heated to 1 000 degrees Celsius, 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 nanometre – which is one-millionth of a millimetre.
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.
Similar to using a 3D printer, more material can be removed to create complex 3D structures with nanometre precision by modulating the force or by readdressing individual spots.
The new capability may impact the prototyping of new transistor devices, including tunnelling field effect transistors, for more energy-efficient and faster electronics for anything from cloud data centres to smartphones. By the end of the year IBM hopes to begin exploring the use of this technology to prototype transistor designs made of grapheme-like materials.
“To create more energy-efficient clouds and crunch Big Data faster, we need a new generation of technologies including novel transistors. But before we can put these future technologies into mass production, we need new techniques for prototyping below 30 nanometres,” says Dr Armin Knoll, a physicist and inventor at IBM Research.
“With our novel technique we can achieve very high resolution at 10 nanometres at greatly reduced cost and complexity. In particular by controlling the amount of material evaporated, we can also produce 3D relief patterns at the unprecedented accuracy of merely one nanometre in a vertical direction. Now it’s up to the imagination of scientists and engineers to apply this technique to real-world challenges.”
Scientists envision many different applications including nano-sized security tags to prevent the forgery of documents like passports and priceless works of art and in the emerging field of quantum computing. One way to connect quantum systems is via electromagnetic radiation or light. The nano-sized tip could be used to create high-quality patterns to control and manipulate light at unprecedented precision.
IBM has licensed this technology to a start-up based in Switzerland called SwissLitho, which is bringing the technology to market under the name NanoFrazor. Several weeks ago, the firm shipped its first NanoFrazor to McGill University’s Nanotools Microfab in Canada, where scientists and students will use the tool’s unique fabrication capabilities to experiment with ideas for designing novel nano-devices.
To celebrate the tool’s arrival the university created a nano-sized map of Canada measuring 30 micrometres or 0.030 millimetres wide.