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

Physicists at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) are bringing the Christmas cheer by using a 3D nanolithography tool called the Nanofrazor to cut the smallest record ever. The tune they “recorded,” in full stereo no less: the first 25 seconds of “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree.”

”I have done lithography for 30 years, and although we’ve had this machine for a while, it still feels like science fiction,” said Peter Bøggild, a physicist at DTU. “To get an idea of the scale we are working at, we could write our signatures on a red blood cell with this thing. The most radical thing is that we can create free-form 3D landscapes at that crazy resolution.”

Back in 2015, the same DTU group created a microscopic color image of the Mona Lisa, some 10,000 times smaller than Leonardo da Vinci’s original painting. To do so, they created a nanoscale surface structure consisting of rows of columns, covered by a 20-nm thick layer of aluminum. How much a column was deformed determined which colors of light were reflected, and the deformation in turn was determined by the intensity of the pulsed laser beam. For instance, low-intensity pulses only deformed the columns slightly, producing blue and purple tones, while strong pulses significantly deformed the columns, producing orange and yellow tones. The resulting image fit in a space smaller than the footprint taken up by a single pixel on an iPhone Retina display.