Week+of+September+13-14

September 13th: Becky had the idea of going up to the second floor of Nieuwland to use an optical microscope. The reasoning behind this was to see if there's a difference between the relatively large surface area viewed through an optical microscope instead of an electron microscope due to the alpha-particle bombardment. However, for this first test, we just used a piece of clean, annealed Au(III). We weren't able to see many features, although this was basically just a control to see what clean gold looked like, with plans to later use the optical scope on bombarded gold. When we returned to the lab, I scanned the sample with the AFM, although it wasn't for very long, so I only mamaged to get two good images.

September 14th: Yesterday, after I left, Becky took a piece of annealed gold and exposed on the Polonium. I scanned that and got several images. I also scanned an annealed piece from the 13th that hadn't been exposed. The microscope worked well, and it didn't act up much, it worked unusually well.