bw - AI Weirdness (Page 3)

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By Janelle Shane On February 08, 2014 - 1 min read

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

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By Janelle Shane On February 01, 2014 - 1 min read

Fracture patterns at the edge of a broken wafer (broken on purpose, for once). The lighter top layer is silicon, and the darker bottom layer is glass. The glass looks darker than the silicon because it’s a better electrical insulator - the electron beam microscope makes an image by

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By Janelle Shane On January 23, 2014 - 1 min read

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

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By Janelle Shane On January 16, 2014 - 1 min read

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

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

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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By Janelle Shane On December 10, 2013 - 1 min read

Coastline of the land of monuments… tiny monuments. Each of them would fit easily inside a single human cell. They’re formed out of semiconductor, and are the result of what we call micromasking: tiny bits of debris landed on the semiconductor before the etching step, and protected the semiconductor

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By Janelle Shane On December 02, 2013 - 1 min read

This one looked to me like a line of people, standing at attention. It’s actually an edge-on view of a comb-like grating structure, seen here as it passes between two rectangular alignment markers. The people-like shape is due to the weird way the plasma etcher ate away the semiconductor,

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By Janelle Shane On November 22, 2013 - 1 min read

Frostlike patterns emerge when acetone partially dissolves a plasticy layer of old photoresist. This is the same sample as in my previous post [http://tmblr.co/ZP7VLs_nDmsM], which used to be covered in jagged black mountains made of plasma-damaged photoresist. Now the mountains are mostly dissolved away, except for

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By Janelle Shane On November 18, 2013 - 1 min read

This image is from a test of our plasma etcher, and shows a white plain of semiconductor laser material etched partially away by plasma. In the background is the black remains of photoresist that was protecting other areas of semiconductor from being etched - it did the job, but took

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By Janelle Shane On November 13, 2013 - 1 min read

A strange miniature landscape, none of which is supposed to be there. It’s quite small indeed - the pinnacles are each less than 1 micrometer tall, which means you’d need to stack a thousand of them on top of each other to equal one millimeter. This landscape is

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