Leonardo da Titchy: the 30-micron Mona Lisa

The team’s creation, dubbed ‘Mini Lisa,’ is claimed to demonstrate a technique that could potentially be used to achieve nanomanufacturing of devices because the team was able to vary the surface concentration of molecules on such short-length scales.

The image was created with an atomic force microscope and ThermoChemical NanoLithography (TCNL). Going pixel by pixel, the Georgia Tech team positioned a heated cantilever at the substrate surface to create a series of confined nanoscale chemical reactions.

By varying only the heat at each location, Ph.D. candidate Keith Carroll reportedly controlled the number of new molecules that were created. The greater the heat, the greater the local concentration. More heat produced the lighter shades of grey. Less heat produced the darker shades in her dress and hair seen when the molecular canvas is visualized using fluorescent dye. Each pixel is spaced by 125 nanometres.

‘By tuning the temperature, our team manipulated chemical reactions to yield variations in the molecular concentrations on the nanoscale,’ said Jennifer Curtis, an associate professor in the School of Physics and the study’s lead author. ‘The spatial confinement of these reactions provides the precision required to generate complex chemical images like the Mini Lisa.’