To honour the effort and great performance of our football national team, Luciana Martínez used our optical printing setup to make a “nano FIFA world cup” made of gold nanoparticles.
The FIFA world cup is made of about 6 kilograms of gold 18k, which is about 4,5 kilograms of pure gold. The nano world cup is made of 287 nanoparticles, equivalent to 15 picograms of pure gold (0.000000000000015 kilograms).
These patterns were made by capturing single gold nanoparticles from a colloidal suspension (liquid) and placing them one by one on predetermined positions of the substrate using optical forces. We call this technique optical printing of nanoparticles, and we investigate it for various applications in nanotechnology.
