INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
All around the world, hip young people are competing to see who can live in the tiniest, quirkiest, twee-est house
But this one has them all beat
Assembled by a combination of origami and nanometer-precise robot wielding an ion beam, this tiniest of houses measures about 20 micrometers
For comparison, that almost as small as a studio in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
It from the Femto-ST Institute in France, where the
tiny house trend has clearly become an obsession
Really, though, the researchers aren&t just playing around
Assembly of complex structures at this scale is needed in many industries: building a special radiation or biological sensor in place on the
tip of an optical fiber could let locations be probed or monitored that were inaccessible before.
The house is constructed to show the
precision with which the tools the team has developed can operate
The robot that does the assembly, which they callμRobotex, isn&t itself at the nano scale, but operates with an accuracy of as little as 2
nanometers.
The operator of μRobotex first laid down a layer of silica on the tip of a cut optical fiber less than the width of a human
They then used an ion beam to cut out the shape of the walls and add the windows and doors
By cutting through some places but only scoring in others, physical forces are created that cause the walls to fold upwards and meet.
Once
they&re in place, μRobotex switches tools and uses a gas injection system to attach those surfaces to each other
Once done, the system even &sputters& a tiled pattern on the roof.
Having built this house as a proof of concept, the team is now aiming to
make even smaller structures on the tips of carbon nanotubes — ones that could comfortably pass through the house windows.
The researchers
published their methods in the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology.
