Miniature versions of famous paintings, including Girl with a Pearl Earring and Mona Lisa, have been created using nanotechnology. Each is just a few millimetres across.
at Nanjing University in China and his colleagues made these minuscule masterpieces using nanostructures that manipulate light rays that hit them, reflecting only specific colours, while suppressing all others.
The technique is inspired by insects such as butterflies that have intricate colours in their wings that are created through structural means, rather than pigment. It allows for better colour reproduction than paints or dyes, which don鈥檛 work on these tiny scales, says Xu. 鈥淭heir optical performance dramatically deteriorates once particle dimensions fall below the micrometre scale.鈥�
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The researchers began by converting Leonardo da Vinci鈥檚 Mona Lisa into pixels of specific colours. They then used so-called electron beam lithography to carve nanostructures, each designed to replicate the colour of one pixel, into silicon. Finally, they transferred this material to a silver film, just 200 nanometres thick, using adhesive tape. This silver backing helps reflect light through the nanostructures, creating the colours.
The team also replicated Johannes Vermeer鈥檚 Girl with a Pearl Earring and da Vinci鈥檚 Virgin of the Rocks using the same technique. Xu says that despite some slight differences in certain colours between the nanoscale versions and the real artworks, the reproductions are largely identical.
Xu says the technology could one day be used in anti-counterfeiting efforts. 鈥淲e can print our information-patterned nanostructures in some important currency or luxury goods,鈥� he says.
鈥淭he ability to produce colour from nanostructured materials is not a new concept, but this publication reports nanostructured plasmonic structures that can simultaneously exhibit high colour saturation, a broad colour spectrum and high contrast images,鈥� says at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology.
鈥淧erhaps more interesting from a technology point of view is the potential to use images printed in this way to encode information and/or act as anticounterfeit devices,鈥� he says.
Nature Nanotechnology
