Semiconductor chips are among the many smallest and most detailed objects people can manufacture. Shrinking the dimensions and upping the complexity is a battle towards the boundaries of physics, and optical lithography—etching nanometre-scale patterns onto silicon with short-wavelength gentle—is its most excessive frontier. ASML, a Dutch agency that builds such lithography instruments, takes an virtually sci-fi method by blasting molten tin droplets with lasers in a vacuum to supply excessive ultraviolet (EUV) gentle with a wavelength of simply 13.5nm. Now, some researchers hope to generate extra highly effective EUV beams with a particle accelerator that propels electrons to almost the velocity of sunshine.
