IBM Chisels World's Smallest Magazine Cover Using Tiny Needle

IBM researchers have "chiseled" out a magazine cover of National Geographic, which measures just 11 × 14 micrometers. The cover is so small that 2,000 such covers could fit on a grain of salt.

The Guinness Book of Records confirmed Friday that this is the world's tiniest magazine cover, the Guardian reported.

The National Geographic Kids Magazine cover, complete with adorable panda babies and a story about rescued hippos, was carved out of plastic with a tiny, heatable silicon tip with a sharp apex. The "needle" used to chisel the cover is around 100,000 times sharper than a sharpened pencil. The tool works like a 3D printer.

The cover was written and imaged using NanoFrazor closed-loop lithography technology, a Switzerland-based company called SwissLitho said in a news statement. The start-up is partnering with IBM to bring the technology to market.

"My idea was to do something similar to chiseling a rock, but just to do it on a nano-scale," said Urs Duerig, a scientist at IBM in Switzerland and one of the inventors of the machine, according to nbcnews.

"With our novel technique we can achieve very a high resolution at 10 nanometers at greatly reduced cost and complexity. In particular by controlling the amount of material evaporated, we can also produce 3D relief patterns at the unprecedented accuracy of merely one nanometer in a vertical direction. Now it's up to the imagination of scientists and engineers to apply this technique to real-world challenges," said Dr. Armin Knoll, a physicist at IBM Research, according to a statement by IBM.

According to IBM, the technology can be used to create tiny products. Nano-sized security devices could be used to tag works of art and currency. The tiny needle used in the research could advance Quantum computing by enabling scientists to create small devices that can control and manipulate light with precision.

Previously, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology used a process called ThermoChemical NanoLithography (TCNL) to create the World's smallest painting of Mona Lisa. Their "Mini Lisa" was painted on a substrate that measured just 30 microns in width.