Vinyl record grooves under electron microscope

Chris Supranowitz is a researcher at The Insitute of Optics at the University of Rochester. Along with a number of other spectacular studies (such as quantum optics, trapping of atoms, dark states and entanglement), Chris has decided to look at the grooves of a vinyl record using the institute’s electron microscope…

 

Here is a shot of a number of record grooves (the dark bits are the top of the grooves, i.e. the uncut vinyl):

 

 

The grooves magnified 500x – the little bumps are dust on the record:

 

And here’s a single groove even closer still, magnified 1000 times:

 

Chris also did the pits in a CD – here’s what they look like, just for contrast:

 

Chris decided to take the whole electron microscope image one step further, and created a blue/red 3-dimensional image of the record groove! So, if you have a pair of 3D glasses (sorry, the ones you got from watching Avatar won’t work – you need red on the left, blue on the right), throw them on and take a look at this amazing picture:

 

 

via SynthGear | Chris Supranowitz

 

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How vinyl records are produced (via Discovery):