Tag: Newsletter

A particle of dust, viewed at around 19,000x in an electron microscope. It’s sitting on a little pedestal that it made itself out of my semiconductor laser material - no, I didn’t give it permission. The dust particle selflessly protected that patch of semiconductor from the harsh etching

Microscopic hills along a glass fracture Here, the edge of one of my samples was chipped, and the glass had flaked off in a ridged pattern. The ridges continued right down to the border of the chipped area, where they became microscopic. These hills are so small that you could

An upside-down mountain, formed from dust. The whole thing is about the size of a single bacterium. The mountain is, as usual, not supposed to be there - it’s a piece of dust that landed on my sample. Despite doing all my processing work in the cleanroom, it’s

Reactive ion etcher: capable of using high-energy plasma to blast away metal, glass, and a lot more. Also capable of running Solitaire. To be fair, the guy using this machine is probably killing time while the machine runs an etching process, or pumps the system down to vacuum. Otherwise

Extreme close-up of tape in a scanning electron microscope. It’s conductive carbon tape, which we use for mounting stuff in the electron microscope, and it’s usually covered in strange craters and textures - I don’t know what purpose those serve. Does make it look like some kind

Newton’s rings put on a microscopic show. This is a microscope image, about 20x, of some bright bands of color that appeared on the surface of one of my samples. They’re formed from a colorless film of residue left behind after some IPA dried on my sample - the

Someone asked me yesterday how big my samples are, and what it all looks like. This is a zoomed-out view (only 90x!) showing a nearly edge-on view of one of my samples, sitting on a cratered sea of carbon tape. It’s so zoomed-out that I almost

Multicolored marbled patterns! Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you an unsuccessful attempt to clean tape scum off a delicate semiconductor surface. The carbon tape I use in the scanning electron microscope, which looks so cool in the microscope and improves my image quality so much, leaves scum behind, as it

The lace ship. This is some sort of dust that landed on my sample before etching - I do try to clean dust off, but I don’t get everything removed. This particular sample had a few of these airy, lacy dust particles - I’m not sure what they are made

Nom nom. Apparently, my nanostructures are tasty. This little guy is only about 1 micrometer high, less than 1/100 the thickness of a typical piece of paper. And the guy appears to have latched on to one of my little structures - ruining it, I might add. I guess semiconductor