The word "Nanotechnology"It has become very fashionable these days. The governments of all developed countries, including Russia, are approving nanotechnology development programs in industry. Nano is a billionth of anything. For example, a nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

Nanotechnology makes it possible to create new materials with predetermined properties from the smallest particles - atoms. It is not for nothing that it is said that everything that is new is forgotten old knowledge. It turned out that nanotechnology was known to our distant ancestors, who made such special objects as the Lycurgus Cup. Science has not yet been able to explain how they succeeded.

An artifact that changes color

Lykurg's Cup is the only diatreta - type vase that has been preserved intact since ancient times. An object in the form of a bell with a double glass shell and a figural pattern. The inner part is decorated at the top with a carved grid with a pattern. The height of the cup is 165 millimeters, the diameter is 132 millimeters. Scientists believe the cup was made in Alexandria or Rome in the 4th century. The Lycurgus Cup can be admired in the British Museum.

This artifact is renowned for its unusual features. In the light when the light comes from the front, it has a green color if it turns red in the back.

The cup changes the color also according to the fluid we put in it. If it is filled with water, it is blue, if we use oil, the color changes to bright red.

On the subject of alcohol harm

We will return to this mystery. First we will try to explain why the diatreta is called the Lycurgus Cup. The surface of the goblet is decorated with a beautiful haut-relief, which depicts the suffering of a bearded man, bound by the shoots of a vine.

Of all the familiar myths of ancient Greece and Rome, this theme draws the most rumors of the death of Thracian King Lykurg, probably living around 800 BC

According to legend, Lycurgus, who was a great opponent of the Bacchanals, attacked the wine god Dionysus, killed many of the accompanying Bakchantas, and expelled him from his territory with the whole procession. Dionysus, after recovering from such humiliation, sent one of the nymph-hyads, Ambrosia, to the king who had offended him. She came to Lycurgus in the form of a passionate beauty. Hyada was able to enchant Lycurgus and persuade him to drink wine.

The drunken king fell into madness, attacked his own mother and tried to rape her. Then he ran out of the vineyard, cutting it into pieces of his own son, Dryant, whom he considered to be a vine. The same fate affected Lykurg's wife.

Eventually, Lycurgus became easy prey for Dionysus, the Lord, and the satyrs, who, in the form of vine shoots, braided his body and wiped him almost to death. In an effort to free himself from the grip, the king waved his ax and cut off his own leg. Then he bled to death and died.

Historians believe that the theme of the relief was not chosen at random. It is said to depict the victory of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great over the despotic co-ruler Licinius. This conclusion was most likely reached on the assumption that the cup was made in the 4th century AD

In this regard, it can be noted that the exact time of formation of products from inorganic materials is practically impossible to determine. It cannot be ruled out that this diatreta arose from far more distant times than antiquity. In addition, it is very difficult to understand why Licinius is identified with the man shown on the cup. There are no logical preconditions for this.

Similarly, it can not be confirmed that the relief illustrates the myth of King Lykurg. With similar success, we can assume that a parable of the danger of alcohol abuse is displayed on the cup as a peculiar warning to the drinkers that they do not lose their heads.

The place of manufacture is also determined by assumptions on the basis that Alexandria and Rome were famous in antiquity as centers of glassmaking. The cup has a wonderfully beautiful grid ornament, which has the ability to add relief to the volume. Such products were considered very expensive in late antiquity and could only be afforded by the rich.

There is no consensus on the purpose of using this cup. Some believe that it was used by priests during Dionysian ceremonies, while another version claims that the cup was used to find out if there was no poison in the beverage. And some think that using the cup was determined the degree of maturity of the grapes from which the wine was made.

The monumental work of ancient civilization

Nor does anyone know where the artifact came from. It is believed that hop was found by grave robbers in the tomb of a respected Roman. Then it was stored in the treasuries of the Roman Catholic Church for several centuries.

In the 18th century, it was confiscated by French revolutionaries who needed resources. It is known that in 1800, in order to increase its strength, the goblet was provided on the upper edge with a wreath of gilded bronze and of the same material as well as a stand decorated with grape leaves.

In 1845, Lionel Nathan de Rothschild won the Lycurgus Cup, and in 1857 he was seen in the banker's collection by the well-known German art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen. Impressed by the purity of the cut and the properties of the glass, Waagen persuaded Rotschild for several years to allow the artifact to be seen by the public. Eventually the banker agreed, and in 1862 the cup appeared in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

However, it then became inaccessible to scientists again for almost another century. It was not until 1950 that a group of researchers begged a descendant of a banker, Victor Rothschild, to make a glass available for them to examine. Then it was finally clarified that the cup is not made of precious stone, but of dichroic glass (ie with multilayer metal oxide admixtures).

Under pressure from public opinion, Rothschild, in 1958, agreed to sell the Lycurgus Cup to the British Museum for a symbolic £ 20.

In the end, therefore, researchers had the opportunity to thoroughly examine the artifact and solve the mystery of its unusual properties. But the result was long overdue. It was not until 1990, with the help of an electron microscope, that it was possible to clarify that decipherment consisted of a special composition of glass.

The masters mixed 330 pieces of silver and 40 pieces of gold into a million pieces of glass. The dimensions of these particles are surprising. They are about 50 nanometers in diameter, a thousand times smaller than salt crystals. Received in this way, the gold-silver colloid has the ability to change color depending on the illumination.

The question arises: If the cup was really made by the Alexandrians or the Romans, how could they smash silver and gold into nanoparticles?

One of the very creative learned men came up with the hypothesis that even before this masterpiece was made, the ancient masters sometimes added silver particles to the molten glass. And gold could get there by chance, for example, because the silver was not pure and contained an admixture of gold. Or leftover gold leaf from the previous order remained in the workshop, and thus it got into the glass. And so this wonderful artifact was made, perhaps the only one in the world.

This version sounds almost convincing, but ... To change the color of the object, like Lykurg's cup, gold and silver have to be thinned into nanoparticles, if not, the color effect does not come to fruition. And such technology in 4. century simply could not.

The assumption remains that the Lycurgus Cup is much older than previously thought. Perhaps it was made by masters of a highly advanced civilization, preceding ours, and extinct as a result of a planetary cataclysm (see the legend of Atlantis).

Co-author of distant times

Liu Gang Logan, a physicist and nanotechnology specialist at the University of Illinois, Liu Gang Logan, hypothesized that when a liquid or light fills a cup, it acts on the electrons of gold and silver atoms. These start to oscillate (faster or slower), which changes the color of the glass. To test this hypothesis, the researchers made a plastic plate with "holes" where they added nanoparticles of silver and gold.

If water, oil, sugar and salt solution got into these "slopes", the color changed. For example, the "hole" turned red after using oil and light green with water. The original Lycurgus cup is 100 times more sensitive to changes in the amount of salt in the solution than a plastic plate.

Physicists at the University of Massachusetts used the principle of operation of the Lycurgus cup to create portable measuring instruments (scanners). They can detect pathogens in saliva and urine samples or dangerous fluids that terrorists would like to bring on board the plane. In this way, the unknown cup maker became a co-author of the revolutionary inventions of the 21st century.