Bragging Rights - Stanford Reclaims "World's Smallest Letters" Designation
Friday, January 30, 2009 - 18:14
in Physics & Chemistry
How many Cardinals can fit on the head of a pin? Still unknown, but Stanford physicists can at least tell us how many letters formed by quantum electron waves can fit on the surface of a sliver of copper - two; as in "S" and "U." That's for 'Stanford' and 'University' if you haven't caught on and Cardinals are their ... oh, never mind, if you didn't already get it you stopped reading by now. So how small is that? The letters in the words are assembled from subatomic sized bits as small as 0.3 nanometers, or roughly one third of a billionth of a meter. Bonus: the wave patterns even project a tiny hologram of the data, which can be viewed with a powerful microscope. read more
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