DeviceGuru

Researchers at Israel’s Technion institute have used nanotechnology to print the entire Hebrew bible on an area smaller than the head of a pin. The “nano-Bible” reportedly was etched onto a 0.5 square-millimeter silicon surface plated with 20 nanometers of gold, using a focused beam of gallium ions.

The nano-Bible was developed by the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute as part of an educational program that aims to increase student interest in nanoscience and nanotechnology.

The first part of the nano-Bible, as photographed by SEM
(Click to enlarge)

“When we send the particle beam toward a point on the surface, the gold atoms bounce off of this point, thus exposing the silicon layer underneath,” explains Ohad Zohar, the institute’s scientific advisor for educational programs. “The diameter of the exposed point is about 40 nanometers. When we look at the written example using a scanning electron microscope (SEM), the exposed silicon point looks darker than the gold surrounding it. By sending a particle beam towards various points on the substrate, we can etch any pattern of points, especially one that represents text.”

“The nano-Bible project demonstrates the ability of miniaturization at our disposal,” Zohar adds. “We are working hard at present on photographing the nano-Bible using the SEM, with the aim of enlarging the photo by 10,000 times and displaying it on a giant wall in the Technion’s Faculty of Physics. In this picture, which will be 7 meters by 7 meters, it will be possible to read the entire Bible with the naked eye (the height of each letter will be some 3 millimeters). Near this picture, the original - the nano-Bible itself, which is the size a grain of sugar — will be displayed.”

Challenges such as creating the nano-Bible project yield many side benefits, according to the Technion researchers. “We are ware of many ideas for high-density information storage, but almost always, an attempt to apply these ideas for large quantities of information exposes new challenges and, in the end, leads to deeper understanding of the proposed method and its limitations,” the team said in a statement.