World's smallest magazine cover created using IBM 'nano chisel'

Researchers have created the smallest magazine cover in the world, using a tiny chisel with a heatable silicon tip to make an image so small that 2,000 of them could fit on a grain of salt.

The nanometer-sized tip, which creates patterns and structures on a microscopic scale, is 100,000 times smaller than a sharpened pencil point and can be heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius.

This can be used to remove substrate material based on predefined patterns, thus operating like a 'nanomilling' machine or a 3D printer with ultrahigh precision, according to IBM.

It took the researchers just 10 minutes to etch a 11 × 14 micrometer version of the March 2014 cover of National Geographic Kids magazine onto a polymer – the same substance that plastics are made from.

National Geographic Kids was awarded the Guiness World Record for the smallest magazine cover at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington DC this week.

IBM claims that the same technique could be used to prototype a new generation of technologies, from energy-efficient transistors to nano-sized security tags to prevent document forgery.

“With our novel technique we can achieve very a high resolution at 10 nanometers at greatly reduced cost and complexity," said Dr. Armin Knoll, a physicist and inventor at IBM Research.

"Now it’s up to the imagination of scientists and engineers to apply this technique to real-world challenges.”

IBM has licensed the technology to a startup based in Switzerland called SwissLitho, which is bringing it to market under the name NanoFrazor.

Several weeks ago, the firm shipped its first NanoFrazor to McGill University’s Nanotools Microfab in Canada. To celebrate the tool’s arrival, the university created a nano-sized map of Canada measuring 30 micrometers (0.030 millimeters) wide.

IBM hopes to begin exploring the use of this technology to prototype transistor designs made of graphene-like materials by the end of the year.