3.12.09

Thursday, March 12th, 2009.

=**HOORAAAAYYYYYYYYuser:sseul**= Today, I had such good images!!!!!!!! Annette and her friends came over and we were like so excited for the results that we got. It was so perfect to distinguish the roles of the i-gain, scan range, offsets, and basically everything. At first, we were not sure that we are getting the right images and we tried the optimize button and OMG we could see the molecules!!!!!!!!!! We were even able to get images that I used for my final (the measurement of the distance of oct molecules). Once we found the right spot, we could explore the surface in many different ways. It was really good to experiment the roles of the equipment since we could clearly see the difference because we had such a nice spot! ( Appropriately increased i-gain definitely gave clearness along with the decreased z-range. But we had to increase the z-range when we increased the scan range to allow the tip to explore the sample decently.) Here are some bunch of images that we took today. Today was very exciting day!!!!!!!! How long have I been waiting for the good images? Yes. Todays was THE day! PS: It only could be possible due to Annette and Dr.L's supports all the time! Thank you so much guys :) Also, the spiral (or screw-like image) things are the common features that we can find in the oct image, Annette said.

{Annette: Yes, Dr. L, if you take a look at the paper I left on your desk, it shows the "zipper" features Lucienne is referring to. These are not uncommon for normal octanethiol films.}

In addition, the drift (the phenomenon that the image is moving) is also common since the tip absorbs some vibration and generates heats.

{Annette: Actually, drift is mostly due to scanning at room temperature. The atoms and molecules will have certain vibrations because of the temperature, the tip "thinks" it is in one area, but it really isn't. This is common for my scope in lab as well}

Most importantly this sample is oct that was in hexane for an hour made by Annette. See how I-Gain (12->14) made big differene. The image is a lot clearer than before. 12: above, 14: below. The above image pictures the drift which is rather a common thing when images are scanned. We picked a spot and zoomed in. This is in the middle of the process. Yes, we increased the scan Range to 200 nm to compare this image to the model images that was set to 200nm. And we start to see the swiss CHEESE! Also, in order to get rid of the white spot and focus on more on the chesse image, we increased the Y-offset to move the cheese area up.

Thank you for reading! :)