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The Sharpest Object Ever Made
ultracool writes "Forget the phrase 'sharp as a tack.' Now, thanks to new University of Alberta research, the popular expression might become, 'sharp as a single atom tip formed by chemically assisted spatially controlled field evaporation.' Maybe it doesn't roll off the tongue as easily, but considering the researchers have created the sharpest object ever made, it would be accurate."
single atom tip formed by chemically assisted spatially controlled field evaporation: SATFBCASCFE. Sharp as a SATFBCASCFE... hmmm maybe not.
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"they were able to coat peripheral atoms near the peak with nitrogen"
Nitrogen?? That chunk who wears a dress-size seven? She sneezes crisco. Sharp? Yeah, like a marble. Wake me up when we get to Kate Moss waif-like Hydrogen. Then I can carve my initials on tubby Boron.
How about, "sharper than a tack?"
Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?
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Well over time knives get dull from use. unless I'm mistaken, this one atom could easily break off, right? Wouldn't it be instantly dull?
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It sounds like science is catching up with the glass blades Raven carries in Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash.
Dmitri "Raven" Ravinoff -- An Aleut native who works as a mercenary. His preferred weapons are glass knives - undetectable by security systems and reputed to be molecule-thin at the edges - and throwing spears. He travels on a motorcycle whose sidecar has been replaced with a hydrogen bomb that will automatically detonate if his heart stops beating.
On another technicality, isn't pencil lead actually made up of sheets a single molecule thick?
We could arm minjas (midget ninjas) with these molecular spears and graphite shurikens to make the real ultimate killing power even more ultimaterer.
liqbase
I won't be impressed until they split the atom. Now THAT will be a shiny pin.
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I remember watching a documentary on Discovery or History about the technique of chipping the edges on weapons and tools created molecule sharp blades.
;)
they didn't need all that research and science, just a couple rocks!
Can it penetrate virtually any material? Does it dull after use? Will it be publicly available?
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Cool! now I can get myself a monokatana!!
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Does it still squish the bread?!
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from the not-as-sharp-as-my-wit dept.
I know the submitter is tring to be whitty, but I'd have to use 'sharp as a bowling ball' to describe his attempt. Surely there must have been a better way of announcing this break-through, like "Do you want you pastrami cut thin!".
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... Does it cut?
errera hunamum ets
That's not a knife...
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Here is a picture.
5M x amplification
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The STM uses a stylus with a single-atom tip and is about a decade old. IIRC it's a carbon atom.
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It's the greatest thing since atomically-thin sliced bread.
Can it cut through armor and still slice a tomato?
I for one welcome our new chemically assisted spatially controlled field evaporated tip overlords... hmmm... that doesn't roll off the tongue well, now does it?
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel...
From TFA: These sharp tips are needed for making contact with metals or semiconductors as well as for the manipulation and examination of atoms, molecules and small particles. Ultrafine tips are demanded for future experiments where the results are directly dependent on shape of the tip.
/. Lotta sharp wits.
This is HUGE news in the nano scanning tunnel microscope world! Combined with the ability to determine an electrons spin, this could really open up new research results in a lot of fields. Good to see so many comedians on
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"sharp as SOAP" where SOAP is Sharpest Object At Present. Then even if something sharper comes along, you don't have to change your phrase, because it is so highly abstracted from the hardware that it hardly means anything anymore.
The dullest object ever made is being kept safe in the Oval Office.
The business end of a scanning tunneling microscope is often a one-atom tip. Those are made by cutting a wire of some suitable metal (tungsten, or platinum/iridium), hoping to get a sharp tip. Such tips look like this. As you can see, sometimes the break gives you a very sharp one-atom point, but the area around it is ragged.
The technology for making these tips is embarassingly simple.
Electrochemical etching is used to make better-formed STM tips. Electrochemical etching with STM feedback to determine when the best form has been reached does even better.
It won't be sharp enough until I can swing the knife in midair, splitting atoms along the way, with a ripple of nuclear fusion in my wake.
Mad scientists of the world (and Canada), unite to make my dreams come true!!!
When a master sharpens a katana to the best standards of the art, the last step involves a polishing compound so fine that it has to be kept in water so it doesn't fall apart, and the edge is so thin you can see through the metal. (Yes, this process costs as much as a computer).
Googlespace, on my first few searches, didn't turn up any numbers for the edge of a katana. It's bound to be a long way from a single atom, but it would be fun to know just how close or far it is.
I'll assume that they'll (eventually) going to make the tip or edge or whatever out of some cristalline metal. In which case, not really.
Let's first define "sharp". No object in the world is a perfect edge ending in a clean zero-width edge. All knives, pins, etc, have a tip that, under a powerful enough microscope looks "blunt". What you'd see would be something like a pretty rounded "tip". What makes it "sharp" is that it's a very small surface.
In other words, imagine two cones, both ending up in a bit of a section of a sphere. Except one is a 0.01 inch radius and the other is a 1 inch radius. What makes the first one sharp and the other one blunt? Pressure. Pressure equals force divided by surface. The surface rises with the square of that radius. So the first one needs 10,000 times less force to produce the same pressure. You can create enough pressure with your thumb to push a tack's small tip through wood, but you'd need an industrial press if you wanted to push a 1 inch steel ball into wood.
In other words what makes something sharp is simply having a small enough tip. You need the same pressure to break through a given material. Having a smaller tip just means you can reach that pressure with less force. At some point you need very little force, and at that point we consider the object to be "very sharp".
How does that help us here? Let's say you had such a pyramid, and let's say you managed to break off the atom at the tip. So now you have a "blunt" tip that's made of a 2x2 atom square. That's still _incredibly_ sharp. It's million times smaller than the tip of a tack or pin, hence it would need accordingly less force to push through the material of your choice.
In other words, forget about breaking off an atom. You'd coukd lose _thousands_ of layers from that tip and still count as sharp.
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What's the dullest object ever made?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.