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Micropipette for printer

02.04.2013

Scientists from the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne have created a glass nanocapillary with a hole diameter of only a few nanometers. The smallest pipette in the world can be used in ultra-high-precision printing and surgery. In the latter case, doctors will be able to work directly with individual cells.

The invention happened by chance: under the beam of a scanning electron microscope, quartz tubes (capillaries) stretched out and turned into a kind of pipette. This phenomenon is familiar to everyone: if you throw a plastic bottle into a fire, it begins to wrinkle and lose its shape. Something similar happened with glass tubes: the microscope beam caused the accumulation of electrons in the glass. But glass is not a conductor, so the "pandemonium" of electrons caused the glass to heat up, contract, and eventually form the pipette tip.

The process of glass compression is visible on the microscope screen in real time, which allows you to adjust the capillary diameter in the range from 200 nanometers to complete closure. In this way, ultrathin "syringes" or microscopic test tubes can be created. During experiments with an unexpectedly invented technology, scientists managed to make glass capillaries with an internal diameter of 11 nm. In fact, with an initial cost of raw materials of a few cents, it was possible to make a nanochannel worth hundreds of dollars for a microfluidic chip.

Unfortunately, the method of manufacturing glass nanocapillaries using a scanning electron microscope is essentially manual. The technology has yet to be adapted for industrial production, which will take time and investment.

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