I was reading on Ars Technica about a technique that allows you to etch 12 nm wires into a circuit link. That got me thinking - when will I be reading about picometer lithography on Ars? A short search later and I found this paper with the following choice quote: “The potential of using such a pulse for picometer (pm)-scale lithography is plausible”.
That got me thinking though - how is that even possible? A picometer is less than the diameter of an atom. Would we literally be etching features onto the surface of atoms? What’s the reductio of lithography - how far can we go?
I believe that by “picometer-scale” they mean that the width of the etching would be measurable in picometers, not that it would be only one picometer wide. Thus, the process might remove an atom or a few atoms per pulse. That would leave an etching a few picometers wide.
An atom doesn’t really have a “surface” so it wouldn’t be possible to etch upon a single atom.
*An atom doesn’t really have a “surface” so it wouldn’t be possible to etch upon a single atom. *
Unless you’re talking about the Voyager episode “Scientific Method”… Bar Codes on atoms in the DNA double helix… I know Star Trek has always thrown physics out the window… Well, perhaps it’s expected - the whole premise of Voyager is that it’s thrown across the galaxy - why not throw the (non)-physics across the galaxy as well!