Tag: Newsletter

Nanoscale forces work in non-intuitive ways sometimes. This wall of semiconductor was plasma-etched so thin that the middle was etched entirely away, leaving the wall’s top floating eerily above void. It’s thin and lacy, and only touches the wall’s bottom in a few delicate places,

String! I definitely wasn’t expecting to see this - it startled me when I first came across it, partly because it was looping up dramatically into midair before it sagged, as I watched, under the glare of the microscope’s electron beam. It came to rest draped over one of

Looking like architectural columns, these structures are more than two million times shorter than their life-sized counterparts. Put another way, they’re only knee-high to a bacterium - the only way we can see them is with a powerful electron microscope. We’re not making buildings with these structures,

Here’s another example of what happens when dust lands on my sample just before the etching phase. The giant wing-like airy structure is the dust - due to the odd way nanoscale forces work, this fragile thing remains upright and intact even after the sample’s tilted and jostled.

Three views of the same flasks of fluorescent rhodamine dye. At the far right is a picture of how the flasks look under regular room lights. In the middle, the scene is illuminated by a UV-emitting flashlight (otherwise known as a blacklight). Under this strong, high-energy illumination, the

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

Unknown User: I am a huge fan of your blog. Never tire of seeing into the tiny dust of things. I would love to paint a huge mural of one of your images. Are you interested? See my work here: Kristofoletti.com

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

Dust again! One of the amazingly varied forms that a single speck of dust can take - they turn from specks to angular mountains, billowing sails, or fluffy clouds. This one’s darker, smoother, and sharper than most… my guess would be that it’s maybe a microscopic shard of glass.

Nanosilverfish? Someone asked me to post a picture of what one of my nanosamples should look like - one that doesn’t have nanofluff or nanozombies or other weird etching/dust problems. The reason I haven’t posted one before is that they look kinda boring - when everything goes right, I