Researchers Carve with Electricity at the Nanometer Scale

By applying electric current through a thin film of oil molecules, engineers have developed a new method to precisely carve arrays of tiny holes only 10 nanometers wide into sheets of gold. The new system, called Electric Pen Lithography (EPL), uses a scanning-tunneling microscope, fitted with a tip sharpened to the size of a single atom, to deliver the charge through the dielectric oil to the target surface.