Tag: Newsletter

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Traffic looks like fireworks when viewed through diffraction glasses. You can pick up diffraction glasses for pretty cheap online - they’re popular as a trippy party effect. But you can also think of them as giving you the superpower of spectrometer vision, the ability to tell apart different kinds

The microscopic fractured edge of a piece of semiconductor looms like an enormous cliff face. However, this entire view would fit easily inside the diameter of a single human hair. At the top of the cliff is a rough dark layer, the remains of a protective layer that we bombarded

This is what an ordinary coffee shop looks like through diffraction glasses, which act like prisms to separate white light into a rainbow of colors. In this shot, you can see that not all white sources are alike - a few of them produce a continuous rainbow of colors, while

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

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

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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