Week+of+2-22+and+2-23

2-21-12 Today I created a PowerPoint including the information for my part of the poster presentation for this coming Friday.

-22-12 I came in today and began scanning a sample of Octanethiol on Au(111) that Natalie prepared. The first scan was not very good so I stopped it about halfway through. The next one had a similar fate with me stopping it halfway through. After this I talked to Natalie about my poster and she informed me of how to format it so I began working on reformatting my already existing project. I worked on this for about an hour because of computer slowness and everything on my part of the poster is ready to be printed. However, I still need Guido's half of the poster so we can print the entire poster. I resumed scanning afterwards. The first scan was horribly, causing me to stop it about a quarter of the way through and change the tip. The same happened with the next scan and I was unfortunately unable to get any decent images from then. I assume that most problems today were due to a lack of quality in the tip but it is possible that the sample is unorganized on the surface and is a poor sample. Since Guido is not here this week because of the play, I will use his unsed sample for tomorrow and hopefully atain better results. The updated version of our poster project is here. EDIT: I had to delete this because it was not downloading any files and I had to embed the Powerpoint through an external source which is at the bottom of this page.

2-23-12 I came in today and began scanning Guido's sample of Octanethiol on Au(111) that Natalie prepared. The STM would not approach until 4:05 ( I came in at 3:40) after several reboots and tip changes. The first two scans were horrible. They were blurry, had streaks, and had no visible features. After these two, I took "AA" which was a large improvement from the two before it. I zoomed in to the lower right region of this image. "AB" was decent -- it was blurry but had partially defined features. I zoomed in a region in the bottom half of it and found myself scanning a sea of noise. I changed the tip about halfway through. "AC" was kind of blurry but had decent features. I zoomed in to the bottom right quadrant. This next scan was horribly noisy and I stopped the scan about 1/5 of the way through it. The next scan was even worse with horrible altitude differences when the Z-range was 200.00 nm, a range that usually results in incredibly flat topography. I changed the tip about 1/3 of the way through. I then took an image, "AD", that had a lot of streaks but decent looking features. I zoomed in to the left lower 2/3 of "AD". This scan was incredibly noisy and after reducing all systematic noise I still could not see anything of use or importance. I stopped it about halfway through and changed the tip. My last scanning attempt also incredibly poorly. It too had a ridiculous amount of streaks and very few distinguishable features. I think that switching the samples helped and that the other sample was most likely damaged from some sort exposure, perhaps it have fell onto the ground at some point. I do not know for certain.I need to cut tips more sharply and quickly to ensure a much higher quality tip and ultimately better scans. 2-23-12AA media type="custom" key="12630010" There does not appear to be much evidence for Octanethiol in this image. The streaks that spill over in to most of the valleys on this image show pretty explicitly that the tip is not of the highest quality. It is also a very grainy image which indicates a decent amount of noise. 2-23-12AB media type="custom" key="12630036" This image here seems to have lost the excessive streaks that were present in the previous image. It looks as though there appears to actually be groups of Octanethiol chains in the bottom half but it is also possible and much more likely that these are just products of noise. 2-23-12AC media type="custom" key="12630046" This image shows a great deal of streaks and noise caused by a fairly poor tip. The features are covered with noise and they are not very well defined. Their boundaries are not very distinguishable from each other. 2-23-12AD media type="custom" key="12630064" The streaks in this image give credence to my assumption that it was indeed a bad tip. The boundaries of the features in this image are also not very distinct and there's a level of noise that simply covers the entire image, preventing us from gaining any more insight.

2-24-12 The Finished Poster media type="custom" key="12639162"