Take a look at world’s smallest Christmas card
Written by News on 18/12/2017
Scientists in the UK have unveiled the world’s smallest Christmas card.
Produced by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), the tiny Christmas card measures just 15×20 micrometres – thinner than a human hair.
The card is so small it requires a powerful microscope just to be seen, never mind reading the festive inscription inside.
It is made from platinum-coated silicon nitride, a common material in electronics, and is over 10x smaller than the previous record-holding smallest Christmas card, which measured 200×290 micrometres.
The design and message on the card were carved using a focused ion beam – “a jet of charged particles”, according to NPL.
A micrometre is one millionth of a metre (0.000001m) and is displayed with the symbol µm.
More than 200 million of the minuscule cards could be fit inside a single postage stamp, NPL said.
In a cubic metre, similar to the size of a post box, you could fit 7 quadrillion (7,000,000,000,000,000) of these cards – roughly 900,000 for every person on Earth
Dr David Cox, research fellow at NPL, who created the card with his colleague Dr Ken Mingard, said: “While the card is a fun way to mark the festive season, it also showcases the progress being made in materials research on this scale.
“We are using the tools that created the card to accurately measure the thickness of extremely small features in materials, helping to unlock new battery and semiconductor technologies.
“It’s a genuinely exciting development that could help to make new technologies and techniques a reality.”
(c) Sky News 2017: Take a look at world’s smallest Christmas card
