Final+Input+For+2010

Best Lab Day Ever!!

The conluding lab sessions of this year were my most successful visits to the lab all year. I acquired about 30 images in the lab on wednesday. There was practically no thermal drift and I had one of the best tips I have ever had. Needless to say I spent about 3 and a half hours scanning until my tip began fall apart. I was able to take before images...shoot the laser, then take after images in the same location. I have not yet been able to examine the images to see if there has been a change, because the images haven't been processed yet. I am going to email Becky though and ask if she can process some of them and email them to me so I can put them up. I will try to get this in before the end of final exams. The laser was perfectly alligned and and was expanding the gold from -118.6 to 118.6 on the feedback. Which I thought wasn't even possible until last week. The most I had achieved before was from about -79.6 to 0 on the feedback. The laser when shot appeared to improve the tip or sharpen it. This shows that alignment is really critical, but we now have optics to aide with this.

Also after this day in the lab I was given a new sample to begin scanning with. This sample is a C60 fullerene sample (bucky balls on gold). Today when I scanned we had to mess around with alot of settings on the electronics such as changing the voltages. I was getting the same amount of expansion with the laser as the previous day, however, there was a larger amount of drift and I never really got a good tip. So I wasn't able to zoom in to where I could see the clusters of carbon atoms.

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