Janelle Shane

Microscopic fracture patterns appear clifflike on the edge of one of my samples. This entire view is less than 10 micrometers high, meaning that it covers about a tenth the thickness of a typical human hair. We usually don’t get patterns like these, because we use a special wafer

The crazy-huge mountains of the nanoworld! The strange waves and scallops are what is left of the protective mask I used to shield the semiconductor material below from a high-energy etching plasma. The mask held up to the plasma, although it was probably damaged a bit - and then I

A mini-monument, made of semiconductor laser material. It looks to me a bit like Devil’s Tower. It’s much, much smaller, though. Scaling this little nano-tower (600nm high) to the height of Devil’s Tower (386m high) would be like scaling up an average-sized human (~1.7m) to about

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Like little colorful jewels, these microscopic spots of color are probably the remnants of a thin coating that once covered this sample. The spots get their color not from the usual pigments or dyes that color things like flower petals and paint, but from another phenomenon, called structural color, which