The Tiniest Jubilee Trinket: Among the flood of souvenirs that are being produced to mark Queen Elizabeth’s 60 years on the throne, one memento is remarkable for its miniscule size. Scientists at the University of Glasgow’s James Watt Nanofabrication Center took a sliver of diamond and carved a likeness of Queen Elizabeth’s head on a coin-like shape. The coin measures 750 nanometers across and features an image of the Queen’s profile 580 nanometers high. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. To give you a sense of how small that is, 2,600 billion of the coins would fill a volume equivalent to that of British pound coin.
The record-small diamond coin is a cool souvenir, but the feat was really a demonstration of the technology’s potential.”Diamond is not just an attractive material for use in jewelry,” explained David Moran, lead of the nanoelectronic diamond devices and systems group, “it also has a range of unique physical properties which make it ideal for use in a range of advanced fields of engineering,” via Press Association
