Tag: Newsletter

Nano Boba Fett? This is an artifact made of semiconductor laser material, that appeared during a process meant to etch all the laser material away. Probably it was formed by a speck of dust landing in that spot and protecting the material underneath from the etching plasma… the remnants of

A microscope image of a beat-up-looking sample that was abandoned in one of our storage boxes. It looks like maybe it used to have some kind of coating on it, which has deteriorated, or maybe the coating never came out well in the first place, which would be

This is a single speck of dust, viewed at 14,000x under an electron microscope. It’s small enough that it would fit easily inside one of your cells. My lab builds most of our nanostructures in cleanrooms, designed to keep out dust like this… compared to the size of

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 I

Thin-film effects, viewed under a microscope, imitate the night sky. What you see here is a flat surface that has a few defects on it (probably pieces of dust), covered with a thin, transparent film. According to the thickness of the film, you get different colors reflected back - this

Nanozombies! These people-shaped nanopillars were formed by accident while I was etching away laser material to make the long wall at the left of the picture. They creeped me out a little until someone pointed out to me in my last picture [http://tmblr.co/ZP7VLssWK9yZ] that they look

I have somehow created nanopeople. Their heads are made of laser material and their bodies are made of silicon, which means there’s a remote chance that some of them could be lasers. They’re each so small (300nm high) that a normal bacterium would appear to them like a

A “perfectly clean” surface… This sample looked clean and shiny when I held it up to the light - I had cleaned it several times in harsh solvents like acetone, and even blasted it with high-energy plasma for a good ten minutes. Under the electron microscope, I learned the real

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 tiny

A speck of dust, viewed under the electron microscope. Looks a bit to me like a pirouetting bison. The dust is definitely microscopic - about 40 of these would fit inside your average skin cell. It’s sitting on the metal holder we use for mounting our samples - all those thin