scanning electron microscope - AI Weirdness (Page 4)

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By Janelle Shane On October 31, 2013 - 1 min read

A ghost? This is a speck of dust sitting on a metal surface, seen close to the edge of a piece of tape - the tape is the weird lumpy surface looming over the whole scene. The ghostly figure (it looks to me a bit like a panda) may be

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By Janelle Shane On October 28, 2013 - 1 min read

Another eerie example of nanoscale terrain echoing macroscale terrain - the cliff in this image is only about 1/200 the thickness of a typical human hair. It’s been weathered away not by wind and rain, but by a blast of high-energy plasma. The thick black mountainous layer is

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

The broken edge of a piece of semiconductor laser material, viewed at 2,402x under an electron microscope. At this magnification, it’s clear that the edge isn’t cleanly broken at all, but has all sorts of furrows and ripples, all invisible to the naked eye, making it look

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By Janelle Shane On October 17, 2013 - 2 min read

Even when working in the cleanroom, a little dust is hard to avoid. This is a gallery of electron microscope pictures of dust specks I’ve encountered while making nanoscale devices in the UCSD Nano3 cleanrooms. Dust is made of a variety of materials - dead skin cells, tiny bits

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By Janelle Shane On October 14, 2013 - 1 min read

I found an area of strange mesa-like structures on one of my samples - near this spot, the sample broke, scattering tiny fragments of glass and laser material across that part of the sample’s surface. After I used high-energy plasma to etch most of the laser material away, the

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

Nanosouffle? This piece of dust appears to have partially deflated. I’m not sure if it really did crumple, or if it’s just a trick of the angle. The light-colored platform it’s sitting on is all semiconductor laser material, that the dust protected from the high-energy plasma that

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

More strange naturalistic formations in a sample where the plasma etching went really, really wrong. This was supposed to be flat, empty, and perfectly smooth. Actually, it still looks that way under anything but an electron microscope… an ant could step on this and not even notice. It’s plenty,

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By Janelle Shane On September 29, 2013 - 1 min read

A speck of dust sits on a pedestal - this is a smallish piece of dust, only about 1/100 the thickness of an average human hair. The dust made its own pedestal by protecting a small area from the high-energy plasma that I was using to etch away the

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

Nanoscale forces work in non-intuitive ways sometimes. This wall of semiconductor was plasma-etched so thin that the middle was etched entirely away, leaving the wall’s top floating eerily above void. It’s thin and lacy, and only touches the wall’s bottom in a few delicate places, yet it

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By Janelle Shane On September 14, 2013 - 1 min read

String! I definitely wasn’t expecting to see this - it startled me when I first came across it, partly because it was looping up dramatically into midair before it sagged, as I watched, under the glare of the microscope’s electron beam. It came to rest draped over one

Tag: scanning electron microscope

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