It's literally in the paper! "The nomenclature varies with the diameter of the fibers (and region), including ∼2 mm spaghetti (small string), ∼1.75 mm vermicellini (little worms), and ∼900 μm capellini (little hairs). The narrowest diameter mass-produced pasta is ∼800 μm capelli d'angello (angel hair), although thinner pasta lunga is produced by hand exclusively in the town of Nuoro, Sardinia: su filindeu (threads of God), which is estimated to have half the diameter of capelli d'angello and is, to the authors' knowledge, the thinnest pasta created by hand to date "

[–] nickhammes 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

At 2mm thick regular spaghetti, and ~400 nanometer thick nanospaghetti, the nanospaghetti is about 5000 times thinner than spaghetti diametrically, and pi times thinner by circumference. That's such an extreme difference it's hard to imagine how small this stuff is intuitively.

I feel like we need a word that sounds like a pasta name, not a scientific one, to describe this stuff

[–] idiomaddict 5 points 1 week ago

It would be too long with all of the -ini and -eti suffixes. Capellinettinettinettine ad infinitum