Physicists at Loughborough University in the UK have printed the "world's smallest violin" using new nanolithography tools. The team behind the instrument, which is thinner than a human hair, chose the project as a reference to the timeless insult. More than just a SpongeBob reference, the instrument represents the future of nanoscale computing.
Using a process the Loughborough team compare to screen printing on a microscopic scale, the violin is a tiny 13 microns wide and 35 microns tall. This puts it thinner than human hair, and small enough that even the smallest tardigrades could not play it—a fact made slightly less relevant by the violin's inability to produce musical notes.
The instrument is made of platinum through a process called thermal scanning probe lithography. The violin is a test print for the university's new thermal scanning probe microscope as it prepares to research nanoscale memory devices.
The above video shows Professor Kelly Morrison explaining the tech behind the diminutive etching. "Building the world's smallest violin may all seem like fun and games, but a lot of what we've learnt in this process has essentially laid the groundwork for the research that's going to be implemented here," shares Morrison.
The university used its new thermal scanning probe microscope, a NanoFrazor from Heidelberg Instruments in Switzerland. The tool has an ultrasharp, ultra-hot probe tip that etches structures at the nanoscale into many different materials at resolutions as fine as 15 nm; a "very, very, very, small needle that can see atomic interaction," per Morrison.
A stencil of sorts was etched into a resist-coated chip by the probe, which was then developed to dissolve the resist and leave behind an imprint in the shape of the etched violin. A layer of platinum was deposited on the chip, with a final acetone rinse leaving behind only the platinum violin statuette.
Loughborough's NanoFrazor is one of a very small number of units in the UK, and is unique among its peers thanks to its being installed in its so-called "glove box", keeping the probe and its potential air- and water-sensitive work materials safe from interference.
The nanolithography process employed to create the violin is already being studied by two teams at Loughborough's School of Science to iterate on and improve data storage technologies. One such research team is studying a future in heat-based storage systems; utilizing nanolithography to fabricate heat-sensitive nanoparticles may be a major step in memory devices utilizing multiple different materials on a single memory device.
Another project utilizing the nanolithography tools is an inquiry into using the probe to develop nanoscale magnetic sensors for even smaller magnetic memory devices. As magnetic hard drives continue growing smaller, it becomes more difficult to read and write magnetic data with acceptable stability at ever-increasing densities; this was the physical limit necessitating HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology in today's bleeding-edge hard drives. But if the magnetic reader could be made on the nanoscale, a new frontier in memory density could be opened up.
While many scientists and researchers have begun looking beyond to alternate hardware trends like photonic-based microchips as Moore's Law begins to slow, this push deeper into nanolithography promises to return dividends in extending the lifespan of traditional compute technologies. And from now on, when someone offers up a truly sad anecdote, you really can play for them a song on the world's smallest violin, provided, of course, you can catch a ride to Loughborough in Leicestershire.
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