April+23-+May+6th

Sorry for my delay in posting.

The last couple of days in the lab I have gone in for the same amount as usual two and a half hours except on friday. I was only able to go for about an hour and fourty-five minutes on friday.

During these days I was seeing the same exact thing and therefore I am including it as one post. The scope has been so drifty that it is impossible to get a complete scan before the tip has drifted out of scanning range, this also makes it hard to accurately determine how much the gold is actually expanding when we shoot the laser. The tip is moving away from the sample already as we are shooting the laser at the sample.

On the 30th the sample was actually dropped be Becky after she had rinsed off the sample, but I actually used this. I was able to use this as an opportunity to see if I could remove junk that had accumulated on the surface when the sample touched the ground. However when I shot the laser there seemed to be no change from the before and after images, also I couldn't tell a difference between the sample that fell on the ground and what the usual sample looked like.

On the sixth of may the scope was the most drifty it has ever been while I was using it. I was finding what were good areas ( I could tell from the topography line that they were nice defined steps) but I was unable to get images that didn't look extremely warped because of the drift.