bw - AI Weirdness

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By Janelle Shane On July 26, 2015 - 1 min read

Our lab’s 3D printer auto-generates Gothic-style support scaffolding beneath the parts we design. Not only cool-looking, it serves an important purpose, since the 3D printer by its nature must build everything up from previous layers. The more elongated the shape, the weirder the scaffold.

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By Janelle Shane On June 22, 2015 - 1 min read

Our new 3D lab printer makes strange Gothic support scaffolding.

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By Janelle Shane On February 02, 2015 - 1 min read

This is the nanolaser equivalent of being smacked in the face with a slab of corrugated roofing during a tornado. There’s one step in making microscopic lasers where you have to peel away metal from much of the substrate, leaving behind pillar-shaped lasers surrounded by small metallic patches. These

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By Janelle Shane On September 14, 2014 - 1 min read

Nano Street Fight Electron microscope image submitted by grad student Rajat Sharma of UCSD, who looked unsuccessfully with another grad student for a Brad Pitt-esque central character, before giving up and declaring the fight a total mess. They were testing the etching conditions for making a series of tiny uniform

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By Janelle Shane On August 26, 2014 - 2 min read

Nanolasers with googly eyes! Because grad students. These are microscopic lasers, shown in various stages of completion. The innermost layer, looking like a slim grey column, is the semiconductor core, which actually does the light-amplifying. Next comes a layer of glass that coats the entire laser (the white puffy-looking laser)

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By Janelle Shane On July 18, 2014 - 1 min read

This is a nanotorch, which is an ultra-sensitive chemical detector, thanks to its ability to concentrate light. In the intense light fields at the torch’s top, a normally-weak light-based chemical fingerprinting technique (Raman spectroscopy) becomes millions of times stronger. More-sensitive Raman fingerprinting can allow us to detect trace contaminants

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By Janelle Shane On July 14, 2014 - 1 min read

Oops. When we’re making nano-devices, chaos is usually bad. I named this spot “The Barrens”. It’s supposed to be a single straight waveguide (basically, a pipe for light) stretching off into infinity. Instead, this spot got scratched partway through the fabrication process, leaving behind a chaotic landscape that

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By Janelle Shane On June 30, 2014 - 1 min read

The cliffs of insanity? Rising an awe-inspiring 1.5 microns above the wave-lashed sea (about 1/100 the thickness of a sheet of printer paper), these cliffs were formed when high-energy plasma ate away a layer of semiconductor. All that was left behind was this island, protected by a glassy

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By Janelle Shane On June 19, 2014 - 1 min read

Like a tiny shiny mountain, this nanolaser and the area around it is coated in a layer of blobby silver. The silver serves as a mirror that keeps the laser light bouncing around inside the laser’s light-amplifying interior, generating more and more copies of itself. A tiny percentage of

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By Janelle Shane On June 09, 2014 - 1 min read

A nanoscale landscape, peopled with little pillars. Each of these would fit easily inside a single cell. They were created out of semiconductor (the same sort that can be made into lasers), when a high-energy plasma ate away everything that wasn’t protected. Each little pillar has a cap on

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