12/18/09

Facing Heisenberg at the nanoscale

Nature Nanotechnology version


I worked closely with John Teufel (who now works at NIST) and with JILA Fellow Konrad Lehnert on making this graphic for the JILA Research highlight and for the JILA AMO site, JILA main site, and for JILA Light & Matter Winter 2010 issue. Then project expanded to have the visual for Nature Nanotechnology, and the article is called "Measurement: Facing Heisenburg at the nanoscale" (citation: Nature Nanotechnology 4, 796 - 798 (2009)doi:10.1038/nnano.2009.368). The top image is the Nature Nanotechnology version which was modified to meet the design/style guide for their journal. The second image is the original design that was mainly made for the spread layout of upcoming JILA Light & Matter issue (it looks pretty good in the layout) Check it out Nature Nanotechology article if you want find out more about visual and research. the links are below.

John Teufel use to be in Konrad Lehnert's group at JILA, but he recently graduated and started working at NIST. I worked with him before, so it was nice to have another project working and talking to him about his latest work with Konrad. It started out with emails and phone chats discussing the concepts and visual challenges of "how to explain" the research (Konrad's group always have a good visual challenges for me). John dropped by my JILA office a few times for a few discussions (its nice that NIST is only few blocks down the road from JILA). John made some schematic like figures how the device worked and had some SEM images of the device which was great start. I proposed isometric perspective style illustration which would help the visual with the scale and space a little easier. The device was dense with detail and John and I wanted to emphasis the nanowire area, but not loose sense of the whole device's architecture. I did all the line work in Illustrator using the SSR Method and then used Photoshop for the final touches and layout. Eventually I would like make a flash animation of the device to help explain the vibrations of the nanowire and zoom in and out of the areas of the device to explain how it works.

  • Client: Konrad Lehnert and John Teufel

  • Related Links: Nature Nanotechnology (News and Views) article, JILA Research Highlight article
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