Tag: Newsletter

A cup of hot green tea! Imaged at 10 microns using a thermal camera. In this picture, the hottest areas show up as the lightest. The tea’s near boiling, so it’s much brighter than everything else in the photo - the room in the background fades into the

It’s just water. Cold water on a warm hand, to be exact. This is an image from an infrared camera I was testing today. It turns out that humans glow in infrared, exactly in the same way that a red-hot piece of iron glows in visible light. We’re

Here’s another view of the sample I posted earlier, the one that was so wonderfully, spectacularly ruined. This time I’ve zoomed in near the very edge of the chip, where the vast plain of laser material abruptly ends at a jagged cliff. By the time I was looking

Check it out - we made opal! My labmate Lindsay Freeman [http://emerald.ucsd.edu/Members/Lindsay.html] made this thin layer of opal on glass, and this is what it ends up looking like under a microscope - crazy patterns and planes of swirled color, some areas calm, some

I was pretty sure this was going to be another doomed sample. For one, none of those little mesas and bumps - all formed of semiconductor laser material - were supposed to be there. It was all very interesting-looking, but it meant that some kind of junk had gotten on

Sometimes our samples get visitors. In most cases, they’re simply little flecks of dust that have settled to the surface of our chips. Since most of the structures we’re making are so small, your average chunk of dust can be comparatively building-sized. They usually scare the willies out

It’s a serene sight - a nicely formed wall of laser material (semiconductor InGaAsP, to be exact) stands on a smooth glassy plain. I added the color - it’s not actually cold here. It’s inhospitable in a different sense, though: There isn’t any air. For the

Dramatic patterns of light and dark chase each other across the landscape. Jagged monoliths reach for the sky, while canyons, mesas, and mountains range on toward the horizon. The mountains are made of solid laser material, and the plains are made of solid glass. And it’s all microscopic, the