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The World's Smallest Jigsaw Puzzle Piece
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists from the Laser Zentrum Hannover used a femtosecond laser to make what is probably the world's smallest jigsaw which will be shown at the Hannover Messe. Its size is 5mm x 5mm and it consists of 100 parts. It's supposed to demonstrate the precision with which femtosecond lasers can cut materials without burning or damaging them. (Closeup 1, Closeup 2)"
It is when it's split into 100 interlocking pieces.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Well its half a centimeter along each edge obviously.
With 10 pieces along each edge, (If you look at the picture they are pretty much square) then each piece has the width of 0.05cm or 0.0005m which for me is pretty tiny.
But the most impressive thing is that the laser is able to cut this substance while not destroying it.
groklaw, wired and slashdot. The holy trinity of work based time wasting.
Just looking at the picture, the cuts seem to be about 1/20th the width of the piece, with 9 cuts in each direction plus a little extra for the lobes... that works out to about one whole row of piece worth of material removed (figure somewhat uniform density and thickness) (9 + 9 = 18 + a little extra = 20, line is 1/20th width of piece and full width)
So 10 piece gone and 100 remaining, which comes out to about 10% loss.
=Smidge=
Laser penetration depends on two factors. First being the divergence of the beam. A good laser will have that measured in milliradians, which makes it useable for hundreds of meters.
The second is the amount of time you want to spend cutting. Deeper takes longer.
Given time you could cut the same 5mm square jigsaw out of a piece of paper 10 meters thick.
I am horrible at converting number distances to something I can conceptualize, so here's an example for others like me:
Each piece is about 0.5mm x 0.5mm square, the same size as the diameter of the lead in my mechanical pencil.
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