University of Glasgow engineers have created the world’s smallest Christmas card. The card, which was etched on a piece of glass is so small that you could fit 8,276 of them on one first class postage stamp.
Created by Professor David Cumming and Dr Qin Chen from the University’s School of Engineering, the card is meant to show off the school’s huge advances in nanotechnology :
“Our nanotechnology is among the best in the world but sometimes explaining to the public what the technology is capable of can be a bit tricky”.
“We decided that producing this Christmas card was a simple way to show just how accurate our technology is. The process to manufacture the card only took 30 minutes. It was very straightforward to produce as the process is highly repeatable – the design of the card took far longer than the production of the card itself”.
“The card is 200 micro-metres wide by 290 micro-metres tall. To put that into some sort of perspective, a micro-metre is a millionth of a metre; the width of a human hair is about 100 micro-metres. You could fit over half a million of them onto a standard A5 Christmas card – but signing them would prove to be a bit of a challenge”.
The colors found on the card were created using a process known as plasmon resonance in a patterned aluminium film made in the University’s James Watt Nanofabrication Centre.
The potential for nanotechnology is limitless, but in any case, it’s fun to see how it can be used in cool new ways, even if one of those ways is creating a Christmas card that can’t be seen by the human eye.
