Flower made of molecular devices (IMAGE)

California Institute of Technology

Flower made of molecular devices

Caption

Researchers placed more than 3,000 glowing moon-shaped nanoscale molecular devices into a flower-shaped instrument for indicating the polarization of light. The "moons" in each of the 12 petals points in a different direction, and only glows when struck by polarized light matching its orientation. The end result is a flower whose petals light up in sequence as the polarization of light shined upon it is rotated. The flower, which spans a distance smaller than the width of a human hair, demonstrates that thousands of molecules can be reliably oriented on the surface of a chip.

Credit

Ashwin Gopinath/Caltech

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