Week+of+12-15+and+12-16

12-15-11 I came in today and began scanning a sample of Octanethiol on Au(111). The first image was fairly decent. I zoomed in to the right middle area of this image, "AA". This next scan was atrocious so I stopped the scan about half of the way through and recut the tip. As I prepared for the next approach I noticed the fluctuating screen on the piezo electric box. The voltage amount would flicker back and forth between numbers but continuously went down. Battery Number V After checking the voltages of the batteries, I tried simply putting the batteries back in to the box and testing it to see if it would work. Unforunately, it did not work and the voltage slowly dropped. I think I shall have to replace the batteries tomorrow. I attempted to scan after that without the piezoelectric box. I was unable to acquire any decent images for the rest of the day. 12-15-11AA media type="custom" key="11847198" This unfortunately was the only image for the day. It was quite blurry but this could have been caused by the parameters used in this scan. The scan did show a good amount of features on the right side. I decided to zoom in to this middle area with a high concentration of valleys. The next scan showed a terribly poor tip and I stopped the scan and re-cut the tip.
 * Battery# || Voltage ||
 * 1 || 7.4 ||
 * 2 || 4.96 ||
 * 3 || 5.04 ||
 * 4 || 5.16 ||
 * 5 || 5.15 ||
 * 6 || 5.02 ||
 * 7 || 5.01 ||
 * 8 || 5.04 ||
 * 9 || 5.09 ||
 * 10 || 5.07 ||
 * 11 || 4.91 ||
 * 12 || 4.99 ||
 * 13 || 4.82 ||
 * 14 || 5.02 ||
 * 15 || 4.82 ||

12-16-11 I came in today and tested the piezoelectric power supply box to see if it would do the same thing as it did yesterday, which was fluctuate between numbers and slowly drop. It did this and because of this, I changed all of the batteries except #1 because it still had 7.4 V as opposed to the others which were all around five volts. After this I began scanning the same sample of Octanethiol on Au(111) that Annette had prepared yesterday. I will be scanning with 80.0 V from now on unless I find that I need to scan with a higher amont. The right edge of the first scan differed drastically in elevation(crashing) from the rest of the area. I avoided this by zooming in to the majority of the rest of the area. This image, "AA", was not very good and showed quite a bit of noise so I decided to change the tip afterward. The same thing happened with the next scan. However this time, it happened on both sides and these regions were bottoming out instead of crashing. I zoomed in to the middle 75% of the bottom half about halfway through the scan. This image was not very good either and showed quite a bit of noise also. After that, I was unfortunately unable to get another decent scan the rest of the day. 12-16-11AA media type="custom" key="11864270" This image had quite a bit of noise and freaked out near the end of it, seemingly scanning an entirely different region.Because of this and the noise, I decided it was simply best to change the tip.

12-16-11AB media type="custom" key="11864274" This image showed little definition and was very blurry throughout. It had few features in the bottom left corner but the noise covering them up greatly lowered the chances of finding anything decent.