Elaborate nanostructures blossom from a chemical reaction
perfected at Harvard
"Spring is like a perhaps hand," wrote the poet E.
E. Cummings: "carefully / moving a perhaps / fraction of flower here
placing / an inch of air there... / without breaking anything."
With the hand of nature trained on a beaker of chemical
fluid, the most delicate flower structures have been formed in a Harvard
laboratory—and not at the scale of inches, but microns.
These minuscule sculptures, curved and delicate, don't
resemble the cubic or jagged forms normally associated with crystals, though
that's what they are. Rather, fields of carnations and marigolds seem to bloom
from the surface of a submerged glass slide, assembling themselves a molecule
at a time.