The device works by perforating paper with thousands of microscopic holes.
Gizmodo reported on the technology, which was developed by researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. The printer currently only works at microscopic level, so you would “need to peer into an electron microscope” to view the image. For example, the Missouri S&T athletic logo (pictured left) is approximately one-billionth of a metre in size.
It prints onto “thin sandwiched material” 170 nanometres thick, consisting of two layers of silver with a layer of silica in-between. The images are created by drilling microscopic holes into the top layer of silver and shining a light through them. Through varying the location, density, and size of the holes, different colours are produced as the light is absorbed and reflected in different ways.
The researchers have refined the hole sizes to reproduce gold, green, orange, magenta, cyan and navy blue colours, and they hope to apply the technique to advanced security markings invisible to the naked eye and to information storage, offering a “light-based alternative to magnetic hard drives”.
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