World’s Tiniest Vinyl Record Is Invented In Lab Just In Time For The Holidays

For those with an extensive vinyl collection, it can often be a bother trying to store large records. However, that won’t be a worry with this special edition created by physicists from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), as the disc only measures 40 micrometers across.

Yup, this Christmas, researchers have created a record of the first 25 seconds of Rocking Around the Christmas Tree, and it happens to be the world’s smallest-ever vinyl. The miniature copy was cut using the Nanofrazor, a new nano-sculpting machine, that the school recently acquired. 

Interestingly, the Nanofrazor works by engraving 3D patterns into myriad surfaces with nanoscale resolution, allowing the team to work on developing new nanostructures that could eventually feature in novel technologies within the realms of quantum devices, sensors, or electron optics. 

“I have done lithography for 30 years, and although we’ve had this machine for a while, it still feels like science fiction. We’ve done many experiments, like making a copy of the Mona Lisa in a 12 by 16-micrometer area with a pixel size of 10 nanometers,” explained Professor Peter Bøggild.

To better picture how minuscule the instrument can go, the professor explained that it would be equivalent to writing signatures on a single red blood cell, or creating an image of founder Hans Christian Ørsted on an eight by 12-micrometer space at a pixel size of 2,540,000 DPI. 

As the Nanofrazor works by removing material at precise locations of a surface rather than adding material to a medium as a normal printer would, Bøggild, who is a vinyl record enthusiast, said that the idea of creating a nanoscale record was an obvious one. 

The only issue is that even though the world’s tiniest record has been created, it can’t actually be played on a regular turntable. Plus, with the music encoded in stereo—lateral wriggles for the left channel, and depth modulation for the right—it would require costly equipment to be read. 

Going forward, the team will explore new ways to use the Nanofrazer to structure nanomaterials, such as by manipulating how electrons flow in graphene and testing if it could be suitable to host advanced neural networks or quantum processing. 

[via Ars Technica and DTU Physics, cover image via DTU Physics]