U.S. government scientists reported creating a pipette that dispenses zeptoliter droplets -- a million-trillionth of a liter.
Eli Sutter and Peter Sutter of the Brookhaven National Laboratory made their pipettes from germanium nanowires with a reservoir of germanium-gold alloy at one end. They then covered both the nanowire and reservoir in a few thin layers of carbon and heated the pipette, puncturing a hole in the reservoir end of the carbon shell, through which the alloy escapes to form a droplet containing between 10,000 and 1 million atoms.
The researchers said the dispensed droplets are ideal for studying crystallization in such a size regime, which is too large for easy computer simulation but small enough to show different behavior from the bulk alloy.
