December+13-14

December 13th:

Saint Joe had a snow day, so I decided to go it at 2 p.m. and have an extra hour and a half to work. This proved beneficial, as I was able to turn on the scope (still the portable AFM) and let it sit while I ate lunch and annealed a piece of Au(III). The images were strange today. The underlying image is clear at times, but there are near continuous spikes in the scan. I have no idea what these are from, and they have not been present before. Later in the day, Becky suggested swapping out the slab on iron on the vibration isolation table in favor of a smaller one, with the idea that the iron piece we were using was too heavy. It took a little while to recalibrate the vibration isolation table to the new weight of the scan head and iron, but eventually it balanced out. However, the spikes were still there. I tried adjust the position of the head, adjusting the power cable to make sure there was no tension, and various other desk adjustments. I also was tinkering with the scan setting during the scans, trying to clear up the image, although nothing really happened. I tried changing the tip once, but that had a minimal effect on the scan. Overall, the scans seemed to be worse at the beginning, despite the period between setup and the first scan, which was about half and hour.



December 14th:

I had a full day of school, so I went in at 3:30. Dr. Loughran came in and he, Becky, and I had a discussion about how to best isolate the portable AFM's scan head from disturbances. We first swapped the iron slabs on the vibration isolation table and re-calibrated it. However, this didn't have much positive on the scans. We finally settled on putting the scan head on rubber sound absorption balls right on the desk, because the weight on the vibration isolation table was not correct, so it had no effect on the scans. The scans after the move were surprisingly clear, clearer than they were with the previous setup. I learned several new tricks today on getting better scans, specifically rotating the image 90 degrees and adjusting the second axis for a flatter images. I remember learning that earlier but couldn't remember how to do it. Another technique I learned that I had not encountered before was doing a quick, low resolution preliminary scan before upping the scan time and resolution for a keepable image.