Here at the Chemistry World homestead we’re coming over all patriotic with the diamond jubilee of the Queen this year. So the news that the chaps responsible for the wonderful periodic table of videos have engraved the world’s smallest portrait of the Queen onto a diamond to celebrate the jubilee brought a tear to my eye.

The periodic videos team at the University of Nottingham dug out the diamond to be engraved from an old, broken infrared spectroscopy mount. They then had a quick word with some colleagues in the nanotechnology department and borrowed their engraving device to fire high speed gallium ions at the diamond to etch out the portrait. Using the picture of the Queen found on a stamp they produced a portrait just 46µm by 32µm – you could get 300,000 of these onto a postage stamp.

Martyn Poliakoff, a professor of chemistry at Nottingham and the presenter of the periodic table of videos, says that they’ve thought about giving the portrait to the Queen to celebrate the jubilee but aren’t sure what she’d do with it. They now considering donating it to an exhibition of some kind. If you have any ideas about a home for the diamond portrait they’d like to hear from you.

Patrick Walter

                  

Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/?feed=rss2