Week+of+12-1+and+12-2

December 1 I came in today and began scanning a sample of Octanethiol on Au(111). I tried zooming in to the bottom right quarter of "AA" but the next image sucked so I stopped and changed the tip. The next scan was also of fairly low quality so I stopped it and changed the tip. I zoomed in to the bottom left corner of "AB" but it was terribly blurry. I changed the tip afterwards. The next three scans both were extremely blurry and I stopped them both and changed the tip. The next scan, "AC", was much better compared to all the other scans before it. I zoomed in to the middle region of the top left quarter of "AC". The next scan was very blurry and showed no real definition or features. 12-1-11AA media type="custom" key="11538806" This image showed a large amount of features but had a low amount of definition. I tried zooming in to the bottom right quarter but I was met with poor results. 12-1-11AB media type="custom" key="11538808" A majority of this is incomprehensible but most of the bottom half is pretty good. It has a good amount of features but lacks definition. The fuzziness in this image was amplified in the next zoomed in region of the bottom left quadrant. I stopped the scanning of the zoomed in image because it was so blurry and provided no insight into the surface. 12-1-11AC media type="custom" key="11538822" This image was easily the best image of the day. There were a good amount of decently defined features in the upper left quadrant. They seemed to be capable of providing some good insight about the surface. However, the zoomed in image proved otherwise. It was too blurry and noisy. I ended up stopping the image part of the way through. 12-2-11 December 2 I came in today and had to reassemble my STM and computer setup because Natalie had to use it today. After that, I began scanning the same sample of Octanethiol on Au(111) from yesterday. The first decent scan I took had really shallow edges on the right and left sides. I decided to zoom in to a large region that took up most of the original region in the bottom half to avoid the steep drop off of the edges. I zoomed in to a region that enveloped most of the bottom left quadrant. While scanning this new region, the STM malfunctioned and I had to stop and approach once more. The next image i took, "AB", was not nearly as good as the one before it. Since I had little time left and not enough time to change the tip and approach, I simply decided just to zoom in to the top left quadrant of "AB". I did this because it would have been likely for me to have not gotten anything decent in the short time frame of only five minutes that I had. I hoped that I could possibly obtain something useful and important through this endeavor but I was not sucessful. 12-2-11AA media type="custom" key="11643970" This image provided and immense amount of reasonably defined features. There does not seem to be very much noise in this image. There seems to be an unusual distribution of hills and valleys in this image where there are more hills than valleys, something we do not usually say. I was hoping to find something of use in the lower left quadrant by zooming in, but my attempt failed either because of me accidentally bumping the apparatus or by machine malfunctioning. 12-2-11AB media type="custom" key="11643974" This image showed a decently high amount of features in the lower half. The upper half is incomprehensible because of the steep changes in level between the edges and the middle. The features, although plentiful, do not look defined and there appears to be a lot of noise throughout the image. 12-2-11AC media type="custom" key="11643978" This image shows the high amount of noise from the image before. I had tried zooming in to the top corner left corner of "AB" because the region was all of high altitude and therefore would scan decently well. My attempt proved faulty and this image provided no specifically important information or insight into the surface of the gold and the Octanethiol. .