Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a reproduction of the 'Mona Lisa' that is no wider than a third of the width of a human hair. 
 
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 Georgia Tech researchers have created the "Mini Lisa" on a substrate surface approximately 30 microns in width. The image demonstrates a technique that could potentially be used to achieve nano-manufacturing of devices because the team was able to vary the surface concentration of molecules on such short length scales. 
 
 Most people who visit the Mona Lisa at the Louvre are surprised at how small it is. Leonardo da Vinci's iconic painting measures just 30 inches by 21 inches. 
 
 But even this minuscule masterpiece looks huge next to what researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created. Using a tiny heated probe, a team of scientists have 'painted' a grayscale replica of the Mona Lisa that is more than 25,000 times smaller than the original. 
 
 The "Mini Lisa," as it is known, is just 30 millionths of a meter wide. That's roughly 0.001 inches, or one third of the width of a human hair. 
 
 According to a study published online by the journal Langmuir, the team created it using a powerful microscope and a process known as ThermoChemical NanoLithography, or TCNL. Using a microscopic cantilever, an anchored beam with a tiny, downward-facing point at one end, a patient Georgia Tech doctoral candidate named Keith Carroll, heated tiny spots on a surface to create a series of chemical reactions to create new molecules: The more heat Mr. Carroll applied, the more molecules he created, making the surface appear lighter. 
 
 Each "pixel" was 125 billionths of a meter wide – smaller than the smallest known bacteria – and Carroll and the rest of the research team went pixel-by-pixel to create the reproduction. 
 
 Their efforts were more than just an attempt to create a nanoscale artistic movement: “We envision TCNL will be capable of patterning gradients of other physical or chemical properties, such as conductivity of graphene,” said Georgia Tech physics professor Jennifer Curtis, the study's lead author, in a press release. “This technique should enable a wide range of previously inaccessible experiments and applications in fields as diverse as nanoelectronics, optoelectronics and bioengineering.” ||||| Arguably the world’s most famous painting, da Vinci's Mona Lisa has now been copied onto the world’s smallest canvas at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Associate Professor Jennifer Curtis' "Mini Lisa" is one-third the width of a human hair, with details as small as one-eighth of a micron. Mini Lisa demonstrates the flexibility of a new nanolithography technique that can vary the surface concentration of molecules on very small portions of a substrate. 
 
 Mini Lisa was rendered using an atomic force microscope and a new process called ThermoChemical NanoLithography (TCNL). 
 
 The Georgia Tech team formed the image pixel by pixel. The cantilever and tip of an atomic force microscope were heated, and then lowered to the desired location of a pixel. 
 
 The molecular canvas is a plastic whose surface contains active chemical sites which are initially protected from chemical reaction by capping them with protecting molecules. The heat of the cantilever triggers a confined nanoscale chemical reaction, in which more heat produces a greater local concentration of new surface molecules. 
 
 More heat produced the lighter shades of gray, as seen on the Mini Lisa’s forehead and hands. Less heat produced the darker shades in her dress and hair seen when the molecular canvas is visualized using fluorescent dye. Each pixel is spaced by 125 nanometers, and the overall image has 240 x 320 pixels. 
 
 “By tuning the temperature, our team manipulated chemical reactions to yield variations in the molecular concentrations on the nanoscale,” said Jennifer Curtis, an associate professor in the School of Physics and the study’s lead author. “The spatial confinement of these reactions provides the precision required to generate complex chemical images like the Mini Lisa.” 
 
 Generating chemical concentration gradients and variations on the sub-micrometer scale is difficult to achieve with other methods. At present the Georgia Tech TCNL system is limited to production of chemical gradients of amine and carboxyl groups, but it is expected that other material chemistries will be compatible with the new process. 
 
 “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.” 
 
 This simple technique renders high spatial resolutions at a speed faster than other existing methods. While one obvious area of application is in making specialized surfaces for "lab on a chip" development, Professor Curtis is hopeful that TCNL will provide the option of nanoscale printing integrated with the fabrication of large quantities of surfaces or everyday materials whose dimensions are more than one billion times larger than the TCNL features themselves. These would indeed by smart materials. 
 
 Source: The Georgia Institute of Technology
– Leonardo da Vinci used oil-based paint to create his Mona Lisa. The folks at Georgia Tech used ThermoChemical NanoLithography to create their version, dubbed the "Mini Lisa," reports the Christian Science Monitor. The result? An almost indescribably small gray-scale copy. Think one third the width of a human hair, or .0001 inches wide. The idea here wasn't so much to create art as to demonstrate the potential of nanotechnology, says Popular Science. "This technique should enable a wide range of previously inaccessible experiments and applications in fields as diverse as nanoelectronics, optoelectronics, and bioengineering," says a physics professor at the school. The process involved a microscopic beam and the meticulous application of heat to create lighter or darker shades of gray. Gizmag has a detailed description with illustrations. (Is this better than beaming the Mona Lisa to the moon?)