See ’em crystals - bird

The image taken by an ordinary optical microscope shows two dimensional crystals which were mechanically cleaved and transferred onto a polymer substrate. Each piece or a flake you see is made of a stack of very thin layers - 0.65nm thick each just like a deck of cards. A single layer is much smaller than the wavelength of light used for this imaging (400-700nm), so the interference inside the stack produces all different colours which tell you about the thickness of a flake. Because those materials are crystals, they break in certain directions which can lead to these beautiful, psychedelic, unexpected or strangely familiar shapes.