Week+of+Nov+2-6

Week of Nov 2-6

4th of November

Today I went into the lab for about 2 hours and 15 minutes and I switched out the sheet of insulation for my sample and tried to take some images, but because I had my sample out of the scope while I prepped the sample the sample took a while to equilibrate. The scope was rather drifty and I got very few images. One peculiar thing was that the surface was rather flat and had steps, but there were islands all over the place which made the sample look like it had spots. The tip was not very sharp so the islands edges were rather blurred than defined and the islands were a significant amount taller than the rest of the sample which made them appear solid white when you scanned them. When I shot the laser there was no change in the sample and I started another scan and did not save the after image (which was only a partial) when I shot the laser. The image looked the same, but it was a little bit blurrier.

6th of november Went into the lab for about 2 and a half hours I was able to take several scans but one thing that happened, and this was the first time I came upon this was that the entire image was slanted at an angle and no matter how much I adjusted the x and y offsets the image would not flatten out. The lines looked perfect, they were a bunch of well defined steps that were just at an angle. I asked Annette what to do and she said to adjust the gold on the sample and also to make sure the tip was not really bent. I did these two things, but it did not seem to make a difference. By the time I left the lab the problem had not been resolved on how to fix it, while the slant was reduced significantly by doing what Annette said to do. I also tried messing with the angle at which the scope scans, but this did not make any difference if anything changing the angle only made the image worse, so I switched it back. Because I was trying to fix this I did not get many scans and I ended up staying a little bit longer trying to fix this.

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