AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning

Tag: nanolandscape

Total 30 Posts
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Another eerie example of nanoscale terrain echoing macroscale terrain - the cliff in this image is only about 1/200 the thickness of a typical human hair.  It’s been weathered away not by wind and rain, but by a blast of high-energy plasma.  The thick black mountainous layer is
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The broken edge of a piece of semiconductor laser material, viewed at 2,402x under an electron microscope.  At this magnification, it’s clear that the edge isn’t cleanly broken at all, but has all sorts of furrows and ripples, all invisible to the naked eye, making it look
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I found an area of strange mesa-like structures on one of my samples - near this spot, the sample broke, scattering tiny fragments of glass and laser material across that part of the sample’s surface.  After I used high-energy plasma to etch most of the laser material away, the
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More strange naturalistic formations in a sample where the plasma etching went really, really wrong.  This was supposed to be flat, empty, and perfectly smooth.  Actually, it still looks that way under anything but an electron microscope… an ant could step on this and not even notice. It’s plenty,
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A high-resolution zoomed view of one of my samples - all these weird natural-looking pillars means that there was some serious micromasking going on.  Micromasking is what happens when I’m trying to etch away a material by bombarding it with high-energy plasma, and little particles of dust or oil
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A nano-landscape, made of dark strips of laser-melted areas, interspersed with brighter less-damaged regions.  I’m not sure what the mountain is made of - maybe even the melted remains of a dust speck.  You’d have to stack a thousand of the mountains on top of each other to
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Nature repeats itself on a small scale - These mesas and plateaus are only about 500 nanometers high… if you stacked 2,000 of them on top of each other, they’d just be a millimeter high. How did this happen? The entire landscape is made of laser material, which
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Tiny nanostructures.  If you stacked a thousand of the largest one on top of each other, they would just about equal the thickness of a single sheet of paper.  And then you should tell me how you managed to do it - maybe we could write a paper together. These
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These canyonlands, viewed under an electron microscope, are about a billion times smaller than the real thing - it’s strange how features repeat themselves on such vastly different scales. In this picture, the landscape is made of semiconductor laser material, with the features etched away from a smooth plain
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This entire view would fit easily inside a single cell. The “lake” is a crater with glass at the bottom - being an insulator, glass tends to build up charge that deflects the electron beam my microscope fires at the sample, so very little bounces back… it appears dark.  The
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