CEMMNT Creates Nano-Scale 'Snowman'
CEMMNT has created a snowman that measures just 10um wide - one fifth the width of a human hair. The company made the snowman from two thin beads used to calibrate electron microscope astigmatism.The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is less than 1um wide (or 0.001mm), is ion beam deposited platinum. A nano-manipulation system was used to assemble the parts and platinum deposition was used to weld all the elements together. The snowman is mounted on a silicon cantilever from an atomic force microscope, the sharp tip of which 'feels' surfaces creating topographic surveys at almost atomic scales. NPL, a CEMMNT partner, is using the techniques that created the snowman to: make and fine-tune atomic force microscope cantilevers for measuring surface topography; manufacture nano-scale Squids (superconducting quantum interference devices) for a range of future metrological applications, including spintronics, single-particle detection, NEMS and ...