THIS is a copy of Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise, the painting that gave the name to the impressionist movement. But it is no idle knock-off. At 300 micrometres across it is the world's smallest recreated masterpiece, closely reproducing the vibrant colours of the original thanks to careful nanotech engineering.
Joel Yang at the Singapore University of Technology and Design swapped oil paints for a slightly smaller palette of nanoscale silicon pillars topped with aluminium. When light strikes the pillars it creates ripples of electrons that in turn release coloured light of a particular frequency. The team created "pixels" of four pillars and varied their size and spacing to produce about 300 different colours, enough to reproduce the masterpiece (Nano Letters, DOI: 10.1021/nl501460x).
A previous method using silver and gold was more costly and could only manage 15 colours, so the new technique has more potential for practical applications. The tiny pixels could also be used to store data or create small security tags on physical objects.
This article appeared in print under the headline "The world's tiniest masterpiece"
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