Tag: Newsletter

Here’s the jagged edge where my sample broke. I blame the carbon tape, which is usually my friend, a nice way to get rid of those pesky extra electrons, and a way to stop my sample from falling off the holder in the electron microscope. Except this time, the

Islands! Actually, it’s Newton’s Rings again, a rainbow effect caused when white light shines on really thin films of transparent stuff. In this case, I don’t know what the transparent stuff is. The material beneath is semiconductor laser material. I was trying to clean it with alcohol,

Welcome to Mount Gloop. I don’t know what this mountain is made of - like most of the naturalistic landforms I discover, it’s not supposed to be there. It’s probably some sort of residue or gunk. It rises out of a plane of semiconductor laser material. Those

Colorful flames and smoke? This is actually Newton’s Rings again, a colorful microscopic pattern that appeared on my sample of laser material after some isopropyl alcohol dried funny. It must have left a thin film of something behind, and that produced rainbow patterns in the same way a thin

It’s too bad that whenever I get interesting images, it’s usually a sign that something’s gone wrong. In this case, the rainbow rings means that there’s some junk left on my sample - this is residue left behind from IPA (now, that’s isopropyl alcohol, not

Here’s carbon tape putting on a show again. This is the most commonplace part of scanning electron microscope imaging - and in my opinion, one of the most consistently cool-looking. We use carbon tape because it’s conductive, and stops electric charge from building up on the samples we’

Sometimes the most interesting part of electron microscopy is the carbon tape. It’s basically just conductive tape, and we use it to stick our samples to their little metal holders before we put them in the microscope. To the eye, it’s jet black and lightly textured. Under the

Hand + cold water = fun with thermal camera Here’s another picture from when I was “testing out the thermal camera”. I think I’ve well-established now that the thermal camera works, and that I’ve figured out how to capture video from it. Now I’m just… getting even more

Blowing on a hot cup of tea to cool it - works! This is a movie taken with a thermal camera, so the hottest areas show up brightest. When a hot piece of iron cools, it glows yellow, then orange, then red, then finally goes dark - at least to

Still life of funnel with gold. One rule of the cleanroom: if it looks like gold, it probably is. We use a lot of gold in the cleanroom, as it turns out to have pretty useful optical and electrical properties. It’s just unfortunate coincidence that it’s also lovely