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27 December 2010

Engineers produce the world's smallest Christmas card

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Engineers from the University of Glasgow produced it to highlight their world-leading nanotechnology expertise

Invisible to the naked eye, the card is so small that 8276 of them could fit on an area the size of a first class stamp.

Using nanotechnology, Professor David Cumming and Dr Qin Chen from the University’s School of Engineering etched the Christmas tree image onto a minute piece of glass.

Professor Cumming said: “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.”

(Nanotechwire)

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