>
Many of us have shrunk the space our music collection takes up with the advent of digital and streaming services, but scientists at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have taken that to the extreme.
In a feat of miniaturization, the DTU research team has succeeded in making what they say is the smallest music record in the world.
Measuring just 15 x 15 micrometers – that’s 40 μm/micrometer or micron in diameter, which is almost half the diameter of an average human hair – the tiny disc is barely visible without a magnifying glass.
Able to hold just 25 seconds of the opening bars of the festive classic Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, it’s no wonder the record won’t play on a standard record player.
The disc was created using a process that engraves the audio into polymer film using DTU’s new Nanofrazor Scholar 3D lithography technology, a string of words we certainly understand.
Postdoc Nolan Lassaline emphasized how small the record is, explaining, “It’s so small that the whole thing we’re making to the pattern fits in a single groove of a regular vinyl record”.
DTU Physics researcher Peter Bøggild added: “The Nanofrazor was put to work as a lathe for cutting records – converting an audio signal into a spiral groove on the surface of the medium. In this case, the medium is a . other polymer than vinyl.”
“I’ve been doing lithography for 30 years and although we’ve had this machine for a while, it still feels like science fiction,” he added.
Unsurprisingly, DTU has no plans to develop the technique further as a music format, but instead uses the technology to help make breakthroughs in scientific research.
“Although we make these kinds of grooves here with nanometer precision, we can transfer them to a number of other materials, which allows us to fundamentally manipulate material properties at the nanoscale,” explains Professor Bøggild.
“We are doing something that we have never really been able to do in physics and materials science until now.
“Another thing we would also use this for is to create small magnetic field sensors that allow us to measure currents in the brain, and for that we hope in the long run to create affordable technology that will allow us to answer questions.” in relation to Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.”
So it looks like the best portable music players remain portable music players bigger than a human hair and can play more than 25 seconds per song.