Earlier today a team of scientists at Stanford University have reported that they have solved the problem of Rudolph the Reindeer's glowing nose and may have found new insight into the problem of Santa Claus and Santa sightings. 

During a routine scanning electron microscope inspection of their doomed samples, the researchers saw something they had not seen before. An approximately 40 micron Santa and 130 micron Rudolph appeared on the sample. They apparently thought that the chimney in the Stanford Nanofabrication facility was a standard house chimney. Overpowered by Chlorine fumes from the leaky system, Santa and Rudolph passed out and somehow (presumably by more leaks) made their way into the vacuum system of the Raith 150 Electron Beam Lithography tool, where they were unfortunately permanently impressed into the researchers' chip. The reasearchers, after overcoming their shock and grief, decided to inspect Santa and Rudolph at the nanometer scale. The image below shows their resuls.

In panel A one clearly sees Santa and Rudolph. Santa was measured to be approximately 40 microns in height and Rudolph at a whopping 130 microns. A closeup of Rudolph's nose B reveals an interesting feature, which is shown in C to be a Photonic Crystal cavity.

Rudolph's nose is apparently equipped with a photonic crystal cavity, which is a novel nano-scale light emitting device. Judging by the lattice constant of 250 nm and hole radius of 140 nm, the nose emits signals in the infrared around 950 nm, and serves most likely as a communication device. This wavelength is close to that used in Local Area Networks and may have been chosen to avoid absorption and scattering losses. This somewhat validates the "red glowing nose" theory of the reindeer, however, makes much more sense from a communications standpoint and compatibility with current communication infrastructure. Lasing has not been verified, but researchers will do so in future experiments.

 Finally, the contents of Santa's bag could not be identified. However, researchers believe that there is no one Santa. Rather it is an army of micron sized Santas that assemble the gifts in place. This may shed new light on the "how fast would Santa have to travel" dilemma, and provide new insight and tools into nanofabrication.

 All questions about Santa, and inquiries about collection of his remains should be addressed to Ilya Fushman (ifushman at stanford dot edu).

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