(Image: American Chemical Society)

This is a copy of Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, the painting that gave the name to the impressionist movement. But it is no idle knock off. At just 300 micrometres across it is the world’s smallest recreated masterpiece, closely reproducing the vibrant colours of the original thanks to careful nanotech engineering.

Joel Yang at the Singapore University of Technology and Design swapped oil paints for a slightly smaller palette of nanoscale silicon pillars topped with aluminium. When light strikes the pillars it creates ripples of electrons that in turn release coloured light of a particularly frequency. The team created “pixels” of four pillars and varied their size and spacing to produce about 300 different colours, enough to reproduce the Monet masterpiece.

A previous version of the technology using silver and gold was more costly and could only manage 15 colours, so the new technique has more potential for practical applications, the team says. Besides reproducing famous paintings, the tiny pixels could also be used to store data or create small security tags on physical objects.

Journal reference: Nano Letters, DOI: 10.1021/nl501460x