Scientists recreate a microscopic Mona Lisa using quantum paint on canvas smaller than the width of a human hair

Leonardo da Vinci's inscrutable Mona Lisa has been recreated in miniature on a minuscule 'quantum canvas' that is the width of a human hair. 

Physicists used lasers to create a reproduction of da Vinci's famous masterpiece in an ultra-cold blob of gaseous quantum matter.

The art is drawn by laser projecting the famed image backwards down a microscope — to make it tiny — and then photographing the result, the Daily Mail reports.

The lasers interact with the weird properties of the quantum matter to change the density of the atoms, thus creating differently-shaded pixels.

Researchers have copied dozens of other images using the technique — including Van Gogh's Starry Night and a photograph of one of the quantum physicists.

University of Queensland physicist Tyler Neely and colleagues made the tiny art by cooling rubidium gas to just a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero, the coldest temperature possible.