Blogs

Our good friends at CRANN (Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices) have been playing around with the Science Gallery logo and using a Focused Ion Beam (FIB) they've recreated the logo on a flat diamond surface.

How's it done? The FIB emits Ga+ ions from a liquid metal Gallium well and accelerates them at 30, 000 volts towards a sample. Given their weight, these ions have enough energy to pulverize the atoms on the samples surface that they hit evaporating them into the vacuum. In plain speak: the FIB digs nano-holes into a surface. It's so small that you can only see this with a scanning electron microscope as one nanometer is 10 ^-9 meter, or a millionth of a millimeter. Too small for us to use this logo in conventional advertising, but pretty interesting nonetheless!!