World's smallest maple leaf

Photo: The Canadian Press

Scientists at the University of Alberta have created the world's smallest sculpture of a maple leaf.

Scientists at the University of Alberta are celebrating Canada's 150th birthday on a nanoscale.

They believe they have created the world's smallest sculpture of a maple leaf, measuring just 10 nanometres across.

That's 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair and 100 times smaller than the world's smallest national flag, created by researchers at the University of Waterloo last year.

The leaf is only visible with a million-dollar piece of equipment called a scanning tunnelling microscope.

At the other end of the scale, the world's largest maple leaf as documented by the Guinness Book of records was found by a family in Richmond, B.C., in 2010, measuring 53 centimetres wide by 52.2 centimetres long. Others have claimed to have found bigger leaves, but those weren't verified by Guinness.

The leaf created at the University of Alberta is 53 million times smaller than that.