Stanford researchers write wicked small

Stanford University is all fired up that it has regained the claim of writing the world’s smallest letters.

Sounds like this could come in handy for magazines like Rolling Stone that have shrunk their format size to save money on printing costs.

The researchers scribbled the school’s initials, S and U, in electron waves on a piece of copper (shown above, as projected in a hologram). The letters were crafted using subatomic bits as small as 0.3 nanometers. 

With the breakthrough, Stanford recaptures a title it grabbed initially in 1985 but lost to IBM in 1990. This time around, Stanford’s letters are 40 times smaller than its letters from 1985.

The researchers, who used a scanning tunneling microscope, have documented their efforts in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

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