Why Did Scientists Make an Actual World’s Smallest Violin?

Researchers at Loughborough University in the UK just took the classic sarcastic phrase “playing the world’s smallest violin” and made it real. You can’t play actual music on it, and you’ll probably struggle to figure out how to use it to mock someone’s minor whiney grievance, but this 13-micron-wide etching of a violin represents a huge technological breakthrough.

Built using a technique called nanolithography, the violin was created through a four-step process that involved melting patterns into a polymer with a superheated needle, dissolving sections of it, filling those now-vacant sections with platinum, and then removing everything but the platinum itself. What’s left is an ornate, super-tiny sculpture, visible only under a powerful microscope. It’s also unplayable unless you’re an especially dexterous tardigrade with an appreciation for the works of Itzhak Perlman and Lindsay Sterling.

It’s all done with the aid of a NanoFrazor, which, despite its ability to make very tiny etchings, is actually a room-sized machine with so many different pipes, meters, tubes, wires, and tanks that it looks like something from a cartoon mad scientist’s laboratory.

All that stereotypically science lab-y stuff is what you need to make an etching at the atomic level, at least for now. Who knows, maybe one day it all gets crunched down to the palm of your hand.

According to experimental physicist Kelly Morrison, this microscopic art is just proof of a concept that could be put to better use down the line. The same technology could one day be used to manipulate and “print” materials at a molecular level, thus opening the doors for usage in all sorts of fields and technologies, from computing to energy production.

For now, an atomic-level etching of a violin is cute, but the process could one day be an extraordinarily powerful one that will create ultra-tiny components for your super small, super compact, and extremely powerful future tech.