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A nanoscale filament being developed in Wang Miao's lab — strong enough to slice steel, hair-thin enough to be invisible, and the weapon Da Shi proposes for Operation Guzheng.
Flying Blade is what nanotechnology was always feared to become. It cuts on contact and does not stop. Strung as a grid across a waterway, it slices anything that passes through it into geometric sections — tankers, equipment, people — without any of them perceiving the cut until they begin to come apart. For most of the book it is laboratory work. The team has only made small samples by molecular construction, an exquisitely slow process that produces strands worth more than diamonds. Then they begin making it catalytically, in usable quantity, and the appearance of the countdown over Wang Miao's photographs is the Trisolarans' attempt to make him stop.
A single strand of grayish material with the diameter of a few atoms, invisible to the naked eye. In the lab, samples are mounted on transparent acrylic frames the size of a hand, the filament barely catching the fluorescent light at one specific angle. In Operation Guzheng, dozens of strands are strung horizontally across the Panama Canal between two posts — completely invisible to anyone aboard the ship passing through them.
Also known as: Nanofilament, the Filament