ucsd - AI Weirdness (Page 5)

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By Janelle Shane On January 23, 2014 - 1 min read

Microscopic fracture patterns appear clifflike on the edge of one of my samples. This entire view is less than 10 micrometers high, meaning that it covers about a tenth the thickness of a typical human hair. We usually don’t get patterns like these, because we use a special wafer

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By Janelle Shane On January 16, 2014 - 1 min read

The crazy-huge mountains of the nanoworld! The strange waves and scallops are what is left of the protective mask I used to shield the semiconductor material below from a high-energy etching plasma. The mask held up to the plasma, although it was probably damaged a bit - and then I

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By Janelle Shane On January 14, 2014 - 1 min read

A mini-monument, made of semiconductor laser material. It looks to me a bit like Devil’s Tower. It’s much, much smaller, though. Scaling this little nano-tower (600nm high) to the height of Devil’s Tower (386m high) would be like scaling up an average-sized human (~1.7m) to about

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By Janelle Shane On January 06, 2014 - 1 min read

Like little colorful jewels, these microscopic spots of color are probably the remnants of a thin coating that once covered this sample. The spots get their color not from the usual pigments or dyes that color things like flower petals and paint, but from another phenomenon, called structural color, which

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By Janelle Shane On December 15, 2013 - 1 min read

There aren’t any dyes or pigments in this photo - all this color is due to the wave nature of light. Thin transparent films produce rainbows, when light waves bouncing off the top and the bottom of the film interfere with each other on the way back. It’s

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By Janelle Shane On December 10, 2013 - 1 min read

Coastline of the land of monuments… tiny monuments. Each of them would fit easily inside a single human cell. They’re formed out of semiconductor, and are the result of what we call micromasking: tiny bits of debris landed on the semiconductor before the etching step, and protected the semiconductor

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By Janelle Shane On December 04, 2013 - 1 min read

Thin transparent films produce rainbows - an effect due to the wave nature of light (the same effect that gives soap bubbles their rainbow colors). Here, the thin film might be photoresist or dried residue from some sort of solvent, like acetone. I’ll probably never know, since this wasn’

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By Janelle Shane On December 02, 2013 - 1 min read

This one looked to me like a line of people, standing at attention. It’s actually an edge-on view of a comb-like grating structure, seen here as it passes between two rectangular alignment markers. The people-like shape is due to the weird way the plasma etcher ate away the semiconductor,

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By Janelle Shane On November 22, 2013 - 1 min read

Frostlike patterns emerge when acetone partially dissolves a plasticy layer of old photoresist. This is the same sample as in my previous post [http://tmblr.co/ZP7VLs_nDmsM], which used to be covered in jagged black mountains made of plasma-damaged photoresist. Now the mountains are mostly dissolved away, except for

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By Janelle Shane On November 18, 2013 - 1 min read

This image is from a test of our plasma etcher, and shows a white plain of semiconductor laser material etched partially away by plasma. In the background is the black remains of photoresist that was protecting other areas of semiconductor from being etched - it did the job, but took

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