Take a closer look!

At very small length-scales, we often see surprising scaling effects. Ants can carry hundreds of times their weight! Can you imagine a third grader carrying a car? In order to build micromachines that can exhibit similar behavior, we need to understand how materials behave at these small scales. Mechanical testing of nanoscale materials, such as those used in microelectronics, is almost impossible using conventional testing machines. Therefore, we need to build our own MEMS platforms for testing. The device shown here is deceptively simple. It can mechanically test tiny samples, with thickness as small as 1/500 of the diameter of a human hair, under bending. Building these machines is very challenging, both in design and fabrication. Sophisticated designs are needed that are often manufactured from one block of material and require no assembly. Microfabrication involves several steps of addition and removal of material and is often performed in a cleanroom environment, free from dust and other contaminants. The more we understand the materials behavior the closer we get to manufacturing advanced systems such as tiny biological robots that can swim through your bloodstream detecting and fighting diseases.Ope