Engineers create world’s tiniest house that can’t even fit a mite

French nanoengineers have created a microhouse that is the smallest house in the world and has been constructed on the tip of an optical fiber.

Each wall spanning about 0.0006-inches in length, the tiny house can’t even fit in a dust mite, an amoeba or even a sperm cell. Built by the Femto-ST Institute in Besançon, France, the reason of this house is nothing in particular, but just an act to show that it can be done.

The house is literally the smallest one ever constructed. It is built on a foundation that measures 300 by 300 micrometers, which is about half the size of an average sand grain, and the house itself is about 20 micrometers long. Because of the size, a pinhead can accumulate 50 of such small houses on it. The thinness of the walls is such that 60 of these can be stacked against each other and it would still be thinner than a human hair, described Science Alert.

Published in the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology, the project was a test of a new nanoconstruction platform called ‘MicroRobotex’ (or ?Robotex), which is a material used on an extremely thin piece of silica and used for fixing microscopic, 3D components onto incredibly small surfaces, reported Live Science.

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The house features various technologies including lab-on-fiber systems, robot actuators, and optical sensing techniques onto the ?Robotex platform. The construction involved a tiny robot that assembled models from silica membranes inside a vacuum chamber. Ion beams were used to cut the shape of the house.

Study author Jean-Yves Rauch said, “We decided to build the microhouse on the fiber to show that we are able to realize these microsystem assemblies on top of an optical fiber with high accuracy. The ?Robotex station is a very powerful tool.”  Rauch credited the high accuracy of the robotic arm as one of the primary reasons that led the station to build these precision structures.

Though this was a fun experiment, as Motherboard wrote, the team plan to use the ?Robotex platform for creating items based on practical use. For example, optical fibers developed on this platform can be installed into aircraft for monitoring engine conditions, or even into blood vessels to detect viruses.