Can we relate the US election to nanotechnology? Yes, we can!

Lisa: Last week saw a momentous shift in the American political landscape. Nanobliss have celebrated (and made my day with by adding to the nano-pun fun) by creating Nanobama– the face of the President Elect in nanoscale.  Each Obama face is made up of approximately 150 million carbon nanotubes; which is the estimate of how many Americans voted in the 2008 presidential election.

How to make your own Nanobama:
(1) convert an image (original by Shepard Fairey) of Barack Obama to a line drawing
(2) shrink the drawing and print it onto a glass plate (mask), using a laser system
(3) shine ultraviolet light through the mask, and onto a thin layer of polymer on a silicon wafer, thereby patterning the polymer by photolithography
(4) coat the wafer with a thin layer of catalyst nanoparticle “seeds” for nanotube growth
(5) remove the remaining polymer, leaving the catalyst seeds in the shapes of the nanobamas
(6) grow the CNTs from the catalyst patterns, by placing the wafer in a high-temperature furnace and filling the furnace with a carbon-containing gas
(7) take pictures of the structures, which are barely visible to the naked eye, using electron and optical microscopes

The structures have been created by Nanobliss, which houses a gallery of extraordinary images of mechanically assembled and lithographically patterned nanoarchitectures.

Originally published on Blog@NanoVic for Nanotechnology Victoria.