Small is the new big, and there’s a new way to build small: Shrinking things. No, the Ant-Man suit is not quite ready, and Honey, I have not shrunk the kids...yet. However, we can now build virtually any structure we want and shrink it down to the nanoscale. Better yet, this new method may democratize the practice of nanofabrication both by simplification, and by drastically cutting costs.
The doors behind which the potential of nanotech resides are about to be kicked open. Existing techniques for creating 3D nanostructures are limited in what they can accomplish. Enter implosion fabrication, an adaptation of a well-known technique for high-resolution imaging of brain tissue.
Implosion manufacturing was invented by a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). BCC Research sat down with one of the original MIT team members, Daniel David Oran, Founder and CEO of Irradiant Technologies, Inc., for the story behind this latest bit of science nonfiction.
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