A giant elephant on a groove of human fingerprint-the smallest man made object

This is a sculpture of one of the largest animals on earth in its possibly the smallest form. This microscopic elephant in this photograph has just been placed on the groove of a human fingerprint. 

Remember that elephant is the largest animal of earth on land. The fine tuned sculpture of elephant on fingerprint groove is over a tenth of a millimeter tall.

These sculptures were created using many technologies ranging from bespoke electronics and software, to quantum physics and special effects.

When art uses science-together they produce the most beautiful creation.

The structure is created using 3D printing technology and multi-photon lithography involving two-photon absorption.  Quantum physics playing a big role here. In this case, UV light is irradiated on a light-sensitive polymer, which solidifies at the place of irradiation. The photon (two) absorption occurs only at the tiny focal point-basically a tiny 3D pixel known as "Voxel". According to the description provided with the pictures, "the sculpture is then moved along fractionally by a computer controlled process and the next pixel is created. Slowly, over hours and hours the entire sculpture is assembled pixel by pixel and layer by layer". 

The sculpture was then photographed using scanning electron microscope (SEM). Using SEM at high magnification, hundreds of images of the nano sculpture were captured while a piezo stage was rotated to a precision of below one ten thousandth of a degree. This process is very detailed and takes lot of time. For example, one second of film can take up to 4 hours to film. This process is known as Nanoflight creator and was developed by Stefan Diller, Wuerzburg, Germany. 

Check out this website for details of this work. 

Also watch following videos.

The making

9 photos of smallest creation in history || art meets nano science

Human on human hair

Science is beautiful.

This is what happens when artists and scientists work together. Here are some photos produced by artist Jonty Hurwitz and nano-scientist  Stefan Hengsbach. These beautiful photos are the smallest sculptures of human form in our history.

As a reference, human hair is 10-100 microns in diameter. And, 1 millimeter is 1000 microns. Naked female sculpture in above SEM image is about 80 x 100 micron in size. Just to get a feeling, our finger nail grows about the same size in  5 hours.

Human on eye of a needle

These microscale sculptures seen as SEM images were created using a 3-D printing technique called multi photon lithography where a laser is focused on a photosensitive liquid polymer. The laser light is very intense at the focal point that the polymer can absorb two photons at the same time and makes the polymer solidify.  

Full version of human on human hair

To create this art, they photographed a female model from hundreds of angles to generate the digital “blueprint” to use in lithography.

Behind the scene creating the blue print with model

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