What is the smallest picture you can paint? At IBM, researchers have created one of the tiniest pieces of art ever made – an image of the sun made from 20,000 microscopic particles of gold. The sun paining was etched onto a silicon wafer by manipulating gold particles. These gold particles are just 60 nanometers in diameter – that’s 60 billionths of a meter and that’s really small!

Scientists at IBM have been working to make super-small circuits for many years – they showed long ago that they could spell out the company’s name in individual atoms. This new sun painting is different because it uses a method that is much cheaper and more efficient than previous methods. These super-small structures could be used in the future to make really small circuits or to test for really small traces of a disease.

Source: IBM Claims Ultra-Tiny Art Project Nature Nanotechnology