Credit: Image courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory
The crystallized oxide (lighter regions) spelling the word “small” was “printed” on a non-crystallized layer (darker gray) by a well-controlled beam in an electron microscope. The area shown is only 160 by 80 nanometers (about a thousandth of the diameter of a human hair). The green background is an enlarged high resolution image of the letter “s”, showing its crystalline, ordered atomic structure.