The World's Smallest Christmas Tree: 20,000 Times Thinner Than Human Hair..

Maura Wilms, an MS Physics student at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, has developed the world's smallest Christmas tree using a powerful microscope, which is 20,000 times smaller than a human hair. To put it more accurately, the height of this Christmas tree is 4 nano-meters, which is about 250 millionths of a meter. The microscope used to make the Christmas tree is called the "Scanning Tunneling Microscope" (STM), which is considered to be one of the most powerful microscopes in the world. Things as thin as a billionth of a billionth, or 0.1 nano-meter, can be seen, while it can move a single atom from one place to another on a very short scale. To make the world's shortest Christmas tree, Maura Wilms arranged the atoms of a pen (crystal) one by one with the help of "STM", then when the Christmas tree was completed, she also took a picture of it. Maura says the world's shortest Christmas tree won't help with research, but she wanted to showcase her creativity to the world in a unique way.