Associate researcher at McMaster University’s Canadian Center for Electron Microscopy Travis Casagrande (ironic coincidence) has built the smallest house in the world.
It is a tiny silicon replica of a gingerbread house . A complete structure with well defined bricks and ornaments and a Canadian flag as a welcome mat. In turn, the house rests on the cap on the head of a snowman.
Silicon
In turn, the house rests on the cap on the head of a snowman . The snowman is standing next to a human hair that looks like a redwood log.
It is 20,000 times smaller than a common gingerbread house . Both sculptures are tiny and invisible to the human eye. Together they do not exceed the diameter of the thickness of a human hair, which is 0.08mm on average.
The chosen material was silicon , which has the necessary properties to be carved microscopically.
Under intense magnification, Casagrande removed the pieces of the decorations with a beam of charged gallium ions, which acted like a blast of sand.