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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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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.
Meta will eat itself
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?
As long as it is only used to poke really soft, non-abrasive things, you should be good to go.
Of course, some nay-sayers might ask why you would ever need The Sharpest Object Ever Made to poke holes in chocolate pudding, but who needs that kind of negativity?
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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?
"Such a pointy pyramid of metal atoms would normally just smudge away spontaneously..." I'll let you actually RTFA for the hilarious, biting conclusion.
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That's not a knife...
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Here is a picture.
5M x amplification
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In THAT application, the small size of the point is of great advantace without ever physically touching anything.
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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.
Do they thrown in a russian nuke in a motorcycle side seat with those glass knives?
Not a typewriter
Why the HELL is this modded Insightful.
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or the fact that the three moderation categories don't add to 100%.
You are aware that that list only shows the three mods with the most percentage?
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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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Why the hell was THAT modded Insightful?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Why the hell is this NOT modded insightful?
Actually the Scanning Tunneling Microscope does not demand a single-atom tip (in the sense considered here). Rather, a reasonably sharp apex will have one atom which is slightly closer to the surface than its neighbors from which most of the electron tunneling takes place. A tip with a radius of curvature less than, say, 100 nanometers is generally sufficient for most STM usage. Problems can arise when the tip has multiple protrusions which are a roughly equal distance from the surface, especially when scanning larger surface features such as carbon nanotubes (as compared to an atomically flat surface).
That said, better tips mean better images, especially with larger surface features, and also lower field emission voltages, which means applications in electron microscopy and even flat-panel display technology.
That said, I've make single-atom tips (of the sort discussed in this article) in the lab on a regular basis over the past several years with an ion sputtering-based process, a technique that is not limited to tungsten (tungsten is hard, but oxidizes, meaning the tip will not withstand removal from an ultra-high vacuum environment). This is a very interesting technique, but claiming it to be the sharpest object ever made is certainly overstating the achievement.