Girl with a Pearl Earring and Mona Lisa recreated with nanotechnology

A technique that uses nanoscale structures to reproduce colour has been employed to make copies of famous paintings, and could also help fight counterfeiting

Technology

5 December 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

Fig. 4 | PhotGirl with a Pearl Earring and Mona Lisa, in miniatureorealistic plasmonic full-colour nanopainting. a, Schematic diagram of designing a patterned metasurface for simultaneously realizing various colour hues and brightness. b?d, Experimentally captured optical photographs of the metasurface-based artworks Girl with a Pearl Earring Matching image (b), Mona Lisa (c) and Virgin of the Rocks (d). The images show ultrasmooth transitions between the different colour hues and brightness by using our plasmonic colouring approach. Scale bars, 200??m. — Girl with a Pearl Earring and Mona Lisa, in miniature

Y. Lu, Ting Xu. et al

Miniature versions of famous paintings, including Girl with a Pearl Earring and Mona Lisa, have been created using nanotechnology. Each is just a few millimetres across.

Ting Xu at Nanjing University in China and his colleagues made these minuscule masterpieces using nanostructures that manipulate light rays that hit them, reflecting only specific colours, while suppressing all others.

The technique is inspired by insects such as butterflies that have intricate colours in their wings that are created through structural means, rather than …