Week+of+10-22-2012

10-22-12 When I arrived, Matt informed me that our current setup will not allow us to get the results we are looking for with the C-60 molecules. We are going to begin building a new system tomorrow that I will chronicle extensively here. After learning this, I began scanning un-annealed gold. Our mission today is just to see if we can anneal the gold using the heating system. AA- 8135.39 Å, 300 ms/line, 4 A/D- I zoomed in to the largest region on the left half, hoping to get a smaller picture that I can heat and look at afterwards. AB-2000 Å, 300 ms/line, 16 A/D- I noticed about halfway through this scan that the line time was way longer than it should be. I changed it and scanned the same region again. AC-2000 Å, 200 ms/line, 16 A/D- After this image, I retracted the tip 20 steps then heated the sample for 10 seconds. I let it cool for about 10 minutes. The approach afterwards took 32 steps. I let if drift for a couple more minutes. This image features a great deal of streaks and most likely random junk from being an unannealed piece of gold. It is noisy and is full of streaks. There is simply not much that is very interesting about this type of sample. AD-8135.39 Å, 300 ms/line, 4 A/D-There was nothing from earlier in this image. I changed the X and Y scan range to be even larger so I could find it. AE-2.31 µm, 400 ms/line, 2 A/D. Nothing appeared to be of the same area as before the heating. I thought I saw a region that looked somewhat similar so I zoomed in there. Because this image's scale is so huge, not much is clear and one has to look for large features that are similar between this and AA. After even further analysis, I have not been able to find the region from earlier in the day. AF-8000 Å, 300 ms/line, 4 A/D. This image looked coincidentally similar to the areas from before. I moved the scanning region to the spot that I thought looked most familiar. The large lake-like features, most prominent in the center of the image, are somewhat interesting. I'm curious as to what they are and if they were caused by the heating of the sample. AG-8000 Å, 300 ms/line, 4 A/D. I think that it is safe to say that this region was not the same to the one before the heating. The majority of the largest features here unfortunately do not resemble those of AA. Not much is too clear from this image. It was not a very successful day of scanning as we had been scanning unannealed gold in hopes of trying to anneal it, a task usually done by concentrating a stream of hydrogen flames on a sample to rid it of any impurities. 10-25-12 Today I worked with Jolai on scanning Octanethiol on Gold. Most of the day was spent scanning with horrible results and changing the tip to try to combat this. Not much success was seen though and this will probably be the last time using this current scope. Parts for the new one should be arriving next week and I will chronicle its assembly as I will be taking a substantial role in it.