Congratulations to Diederik Balkenende from Adolphe Merkle Institute and Samuel Zimmermann from EPFL who won the third prize at the Young Researchers Idea contest 2016 of SwissLitho AG.
The team was competing against more than 100 participants from over 15 countries which submitted creative ideas related to thermal scanning probes. At the official ceremony at the thermal probe workshop 2016, the team impressed the jury members - Dieter Kern, Nico de Roji and Peter Vettiger - and the audience with a real-life demonstration of their idea. In short, a temperature sensitive supramolecular glass is modified with a thermal probe to create a nano-scale pattern. Due to fast cooling of the locally heated material, a shift in fluorescence can be observed in addition to the topological features. The patterning process takes only a few seconds due to its small size. To check the security feature, the pattern can be read out with a conventional fluorescence microscope.