January+10-11

January 10th, 2011

This was my first day back in the lab since my winter break ended. -I started by annealing a piece of Au(III)- standard 5-minute heating time -I again was using the portable AFM -Instead of the piece of metal that is usually placed on the vibration isolation table, Becky found a small brick of copper, which seemed to be closed to the weight recommendation of the table. -The images were still fuzzy, and the diagonal lines were still present, but they didn't completely disrupt the scan.

January 11th, 2011

-Becky took the piece of Au(III) I was scanning yesterday and exposed it to the Polonium-210 from 7:30 p.m. yesterday to 3:15 p.m. today, just before I arrived. -This sample was fully exposed, unlike previous samples, which were half-covered -After image 11111AB, I remembered a trick Dr. Loughran showed me that involves rotating the image 90 degrees and leveling out the y-axis of the scan, instead of just the x-axis -I tried this, with some positive impact, but nothing significant. -The Au(III) seemed flatter than usual, as I was able to scan at a very small z-range. This enabled me to keep the gains low, reducing interference. The higher the z-range, the higher the gains have to be, in order to have a detailed image. However, having a high gain setting contributes to the lines. If the z-range is small, then the gains can be lowered, reducing the visibility of the lines while maintaining a detailed image. -When scanning at the 90 degree rotation, a strange effect appeared on the gold. A series of ribbons appeared, especially on image 11111AC. Those arcs on the left are interesting and only appeared at a 90 degree rotation.