A Christmas card that cannot be signed

London, Dec 24: Keeping up with the Christmas spirit and the mood of cheer and festivity, the University of Glasgow has stuck to the motto - 'small,yet effective'. Nanotechnologists at the University have created the world's smallest Christmas card.

The card is so small it could fit on to the surface of a postage stamp 8,276 times.The image, which measures 200x290 micro-metres, features a Christmas tree and is etched on a tiny piece of glass.

The team behind the project said the technology could eventually be used in products such as TVs and cameras.The university's school of engineering drew up the design to highlight its "world-leading" nanotechnology expertise.

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"Our nanotechnology is among the best in the world but sometimes explaining to the public what the technology is capable of can be a bit tricky," the BBC quoted Prof David Cumming as saying."We decided that producing this Christmas card was a simple way to show just how accurate our technology is."

The process to manufacture the card only took 30 minutes. It was very straightforward to produce as the process is highly repeatable - the design of the card took far longer than the production."The card is 200 micro-metres wide by 290 micro-metres tall."To put that into some sort of perspective, a micro-metre is a millionth of a metre; the width of a human hair is about 100 micro-metres.

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"You could fit over half a million of them on to a standard A5 Christmas card - but signing them would prove to be a bit of a challenge," Cumming added.The colours were produced by a process known as plasmon resonance in a patterned aluminium film made in the university's James Watt Nanofabrication Centre.

ANI