Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology have painted the renowned Mona Lisa on the world's tiniest canvas measuring 30 microns in width.
Technology is a growing industry and has influenced many facets of life including the fine arts. Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology have done an astounding job by "painting" the Mona Lisa on what is touted as the world's tiniest canvas. This canvas measures approximately 30 microns, which is equivalent to one third the width of a human hair strand.
The new painting, named "Mini Lisa", was created using a technology called ThermoChemical NanoLithography (TCNL). Using an atomic force microscope and a cantilevered arm, researchers applied heat to a chemically coated surface, pixel by 125-nanometer pixel. This created a chemical reaction that caused the surface of the canvas to lighten. As more heat was applied, the surface grew lighter. Researchers carefully applied heat on each pixel of the canvas controlling how many new molecules formed.
"By tuning the temperature, our team manipulated chemical reactions to yield variations in the molecular concentrations on the nanoscale," said lead author Jennifer Curtis, an associate professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Physics, in a press release. "The spatial confinement of these reactions provides the precision required to generate complex chemical images like the Mini Lisa."
Creating such chemical concentration gradients is not an easy task using other techniques. However, since the equipment is easy to come by and the process is simple and straightforward, researchers preferred using the TCNL technique.
"We envision TCNL will be capable of patterning gradients of other physical or chemical properties, such as conductivity of graphene," Curtis said. "This technique should enable a wide range of previously inaccessible experiments and applications in fields as diverse as nanoelectronics, optoelectronics and bioengineering."
Curtis hopes that this technique can be used in the future to accomplish nanomanufacturing of devices because he and his team were able to alter the surface concentration of molecules on such 'mini' scales.
