The Beauty and Mystery of the Micro World

The beauty of these pictures is intriguing and fascinating by its asymmetric, exquisite and intricate patterns. What is it? Is it a product of a novel computer program or photographs of fine creations of nature? Neither of the statements is true. In fact, these are not art pictures, but real images of metal samples made with an electron microscope. Only some colours are added to the images to emphasize their resemblance to natural objects of our world: mushrooms, leaves of exotic plants, and seashells. The size of the samples is from tens of microns to 1-2 millimeters. They are produced via self-organization of nano-sized (1/million of a millimeter) wires growing on porous membranes under the action of electric current pulses. We have described comprehensively these volumetric (3D) sculptures as well as the experimental conditions for their fabrication in scientific journals [1- 5]. The most important parameters of the fabrication process (electrolyte composition, porous membrane, pulsed current modes) are specified, indicating when growing nanowires organize themselves in an inexplicable fashion into “sculptures” that show perfect resemblance to natural objects.