Tag: Newsletter

Could this be the creature who’s been clambering all over my sample, raking scratches into my designs, cackling all the while? I sometimes wonder. … Or maybe it’s actually a speck of dust, as usual. This one’s large for a dust particle, but still invisible to the human

These canyonlands, viewed under an electron microscope, are about a billion times smaller than the real thing - it’s strange how features repeat themselves on such vastly different scales. In this picture, the landscape is made of semiconductor laser material, with the features etched away from a smooth plain

The Lonely Mountain, home to nanodragons. The surface of this sample is coated with a rough, mountainous substance - likely created when the top layer of my sample (a photoresist) didn’t hold up well to a reactive plasma that I was shooting at the sample. One bit of the

Soap bubble-like rainbow colors means that this sample has a thin film of something on it, just like a soap bubble or oily puddle. The colors change quickly, so there’s probably a ton of variation in the thickness of the coating - in fact, the rainbow stripes are packed

A bit of string appears to bend space. This phenomenon is called “charging”, and can cause strange effects in scanning electron beam microscope images. What’s going on? To make a scanning electron microscope image, we literally scan a beam of electrons across our sample and detect the electrons that

Extreme close-up of a single speck of dust. It turns out that dust comes in all shapes and sizes, and this cloud-shaped piece is a rarity - I’ve also found mountains and sails and lumpy monsters. None of which are supposed to be there… but when I take my

A dream landscape, formed naturally by defects in a thin polymer film. This phenomenon is called Newton’s Rings, and is the same sort of thin-film effect that makes soap bubbles iridescent.

Extreme close-ups: Tape at 272x, using an electron microscope This particular kind of tape has a kind of black cratered texture, and you can just barely see the holes when you hold a piece of the tape in your hands. In fact, the holes are right around the width of

Bashful dust particle, viewed under an electron microscope Since our electron microscope isn’t inside the cleanroom, it’s hard to avoid the occasional visiting particle of dust. They appear randomly, like small beings exploring immense and weird landscapes. This one’s microscopic, and stands on a well-scratched metal surface.

The “light” at the bottom of this glowing crater is all electrons. What you’re seeing here is a thin layer of glass with a hole chipped in it. At the bottom of the hole, just out of the field of view, is a layer of silicon. In the electron