The Nanometer Matterhorn | Wired Science | Wired.com
Those crazy IBM research engineers, what will they create at the nanoscale next? To demonstrate a new material etching technique that could allow for ever smaller transistors to be made, they created a model of the Matterhorn that stands just 25 nanometers tall. That’s 17,912,000,000,000 times smaller than the 14, 691-foot real mountain. It is even 1.8 billion times smaller than the Disney’s Matterhorn ride.
The mini-mountain was created using scanning-probe lithography: a tiny stylus carved the mountain into a film of glass 100 nanometers thick. The whole operation took 120 distinct steps. The research was reported in the journal Science Thursday.