It's not uncommon for visiting heads of state to be greeted by wonderful banquets and an exchange of gifts. When President Obama arrives in Israel later this week, he will be getting a very special present designed by students of Israel's Technion.
The Technion, the very same institution that has partnered up with Cornell to build the new NYC Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island, has been working on a project that is about the width of two human hairs, but carries with it enormous symbolism.
Commissioned by Prime Minister Netanyahu, students at the Technion have designed a gold-coated 0.04 square-mm nano-chip with the Israeli and US declarations of independence, etched side-by-side to a depth of 0.00002 mm. The declarations were etched using a focused beam of high energy gallium ions, on a chip that was affixed to a Jerusalem stone dating to the late Second Temple Period (1st century BCE to 1st century CE), that was used to seal clay vessels that held liquids and spices. The gift was developed at the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion.
The original image of the founding documents was translated into etching instructions using a special program developed for this purpose by Dr. Ohad Zohar, who conducted his Ph.D. under Prof. Uri Sivan of the Physics Department.
The preparation for project took about a week to complete, but once the computer was ready to go, it produced the the images of the declarations of independence, using two million microscopic dots, in less than an hour!
The unique gift symbolizes the main messages of the visit – the strong and deep state of bilateral ties, the link of thousands of years between the People of Israel and the Land of Israel, and the leading technological status of Israel's research and development centers.
If you want to learn more about how this was all done, check out the video from the Technion here!