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This OSU athletics logo, etched onto a portion of a compact disk, is around 7x10 nanometers in size. It is the smallest beaver logo ever made at OSU.

Etching tiny Benny Beaver

While it's not the smallest ever created, newest Beaver logo is smallest created at Oregon State

By: Daniel Acee

Posted: 5/2/08

Using nanotechnology tools, a team of OSU students and faculty have created the world's smallest image of the fighting beaver logo.

Etched onto a 1x1 inch section of a compact disk, the logo would be extremely difficult to locate. After some quick calculations, team members say it would be similar to finding a quarter on a football field.

Ethan Minot, assistant professor, is leading this group through the research on carbon nanoelectronics field.

Minot earned his undergrad degree in his home country of New Zealand, and a Ph. D in physics at Cornell University in New York.

Minot came to Oregon for the lifestyle and to be a part of the young physics department at OSU. He believes through his research he will play an important role in making this department a success.

Minot's team consists of four graduate students and three undergraduate students. One of his graduate students is on exchange from Germany for the year.

Jörg Borchterle's research at OSU will help him earn a Diplom, which is comparable to masters degree in the US.

"This is a really great team, we have great communication," Borchterle said. "I am not just a foreigner to them [the project team], I am included in everything, not just someone to entertain a year."

Nanoelectronics will be used to build electronic devices as small as a molecule. The fighting beaver logo is composed of a series of lines that are 10 nanometers wide.

Minot clarified these dimensions with an example most people can relate to.

"It's important to realize that the beaver is the size of a red blood cell, and the lines in the image are about 10 molecules wide," Minot said.

The fighting beaver image was a test run that the team did to show control of the atomic force microscope (AFM), the tool used to view and create their devices.

"What Jörg did with the tiny beaver is similar to an artist making an etching," Minot said.

Experiencing success with the beaver image, Minot's team is now developing electronic chips.

Minot explained that the AFM is similar to a record player in that it follows contours of surfaces similar to a record player needle moving through ridges (in this case, creating the ridges) on a vinyl record.

Once the etching is complete, the AFM is used to view it by gently tracing the ridges created. It took two days, including development time, to create the beaver logo.

The AMF is run by a series of applications that the team programs to make precise cuts on each of the X, Y and Z dimensions.

In the next few years, Minot can potentially see this technology enhancing the medical field.

He is currently researching how to develop a device that can be used by doctors to detect proteins associated with diseases. [Note: the devices won't go in your body.]

"What we are hoping for is to detect the disease marker proteins at very low levels to stop disease in its early stages," Minot said.

Minot also hopes to combine the field of nanotechnology with pharmaceutical development to get quicker results on whether a certain drug is binding to its target molecule.

"One thing I am hoping for is to get a molecular biology major undergraduate involved in this project; it is a great opportunity to cross physics with molecular biology," Minot said.

Currently between research and teaching classes, Minot is writing proposals to NSF (National Science Foundation) and NIH (National Institutes of Health) hoping to receive funding to increase productivity in his nanotechnology research.

For further information about this project or to contact Minot about joining his team, go to: http://web.science.oregonstate.edu/~minote/.

Daniel Acee, senior reporter

news@dailybarometer.com, 737-2231