Janelle Shane

A strange landscape with an even stranger sky. This is a microscope view of the edge of a smooth chunk of silicon, coated with a thin clear plasticy layer of photoresist. Just like the colors in a soap bubble, this colorless thin layer produces rainbow colors due to the wave

A Devil’s Tower-like monument rises above a sea of bubbles. It’s just another day in the life of a nanolaser researcher. The tower is a microscopic laser in the process of being built - here, it’s shown after it was carved out of a flat sheet of

The one on the left is a nanolaser, carved by high-energy plasma and strong acid, and invisible to the naked eye. The one on the right is a hoodoo, carved by wind and rain, and is approximately 20 million times larger. And about 60 million times older. The reason

It looks like it could be an image of desert badlands - except for that strangely translucent wall. In fact, this scene is much, much smaller. An ant could step over the wall without ever noticing its existence. This image was taken through an electron microscope, of a microscopic landscape that’

Resembling arrays of flaming islands, these formations are actually microscopic, etched out of semiconductor. This semiconductor material is what we use to make microscopic lasers - we start with a vast, featureless sheet of semiconductor and cover certain areas with a protective layer of glassy photoresist. Then we blast the whole