NPL Unveils the World's Smallest Christmas Card

The card is made from platinum-coated silicon nitride, usually used in electronics, and both the design on the front and the message inside were carved out by a focused ion beam - a jet of charged particles. The tools used to make the card are being used to develop cutting-edge techniques for understanding materials on a tiny scale, helping to further the miniaturisation of electronics, and the development of new battery materials.

NPL has world-leading materials characterisation capabilities, spanning everything from micrometre-scale analysis, all the way up to the monitoring of large-scale infrastructure from space. NPL helps industry to better understand the most exciting materials, from graphene to high-performance composites, and apply them to new applications.

Dr David Cox, Research Fellow at NPL, who created the card with his colleague Dr Ken Mingard, said: "While the card is a fun way to mark the festive season, it also showcases the progress being made in materials research on this scale. We are using the tools that created the card to accurately measure the thickness of extremely small features in materials, helping to unlock new battery and semiconductor technologies. It's a genuinely exciting development that could help to make new technologies and techniques a reality."

Images of the world's smallest Christmas card, alongside a GIF and video of how the card was made are available here.

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Fareha Lasker
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