nanometer

Ultrashort pulses can also be used to manufacture very tiny electronic parts, micrometers or even nanometers across.

It’s a coveted device, with models costing as much as $180 million, that is used in making microchip features as tiny as 13 nanometers at a rapid clip.

In the ’60s, chipmakers used visible light for this process, with a wavelength as small as 400 nanometers.

In a paper in Nature Communications, the researchers describe how they created a random network of nanowires 10 micrometers long and no thicker than 500 nanometers and then subjected it to electrical stimulation.

Visible wavelengths measure hundreds of nanometers long, leaving far less room for error in aligning waves according to when they arrived at different telescopes.