Engineers in Vienna have shrunk a working QR code down to a speck that's just 1.98 square micrometers across—small enough to require an electron microscope to read it, and also small enough to earn a place with Guinness World Records. Popular Science notes that the team at TU Wien didn't create the code as some sort of party trick: Instead, they see the microscopic pattern, etched into a super-thin ceramic film, as hope that ultra-durable data storage like this could outlast today's hard drives and Blu-rays.
Working with storage firm Cerabyte, researchers used focused ion beams instead of ink, cutting "pixels" just 49 nanometers wide—roughly a tenth the size of a wavelength of visible light, making them invisible even to most lab microscopes. Once the code was imaged and blown up on a screen, an ordinary smartphone was able to scan it. Because the ceramic material is extremely stable, the scientists say that an area the size of a sheet of printer paper that featured such codes could hold more than 2 terabytes of information—an updated version, they say, of carving messages in stone for future generations to read.
As for the Guinness achievement, ScienceAlert notes the new QR code is about one-third the size of the last record-holder. "The now confirmed world record marks just the beginning of a very promising development," says scientist Alexander Kirnbauer, per a release. "We now aim to use other materials, increase writing speeds, and develop scalable manufacturing processes so that ceramic data storage can be used not only in laboratories but also in industrial applications."
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