Sunday February 09, 2014

A rare view of the entire cross-section of one of my samples, which seems to loom like a massive iceberg over choppy seas. This sample is a thin layer of semiconductor (a material we use for making lasers, among other things), bonded to a much thicker chunk of glass. The scale bar on this image is 100 microns, or approximately the thickness of the average human hair. The sample sits on a rough cratered surface of carbon tape, which is what we usually use for attaching things to the electron microscope’s sample holder. Here, there’s no particular structure that I was trying to make out of this sample - I was using it to test the recipe for etching the semiconductor using high-energy plasma. (It does amuse me that we call them recipes, as if we were making nanocookies or something.)