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
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
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
Looking like architectural columns, these structures are more than two million
times shorter than their life-sized counterparts. Put another way, they’re only
knee-high to a bacterium - the only way we can see them is with a powerful
electron microscope.
We’re not making buildings with these structures, but
Here’s another example of what happens when dust lands on my sample just before
the etching phase. The giant wing-like airy structure is the dust - due to the
odd way nanoscale forces work, this fragile thing remains upright and intact
even after the sample’s tilted and jostled.
Three views of the same flasks of fluorescent rhodamine dye. At the far right
is a picture of how the flasks look under regular room lights. In the middle,
the scene is illuminated by a UV-emitting flashlight (otherwise known as a
blacklight). Under this strong, high-energy illumination, the fluorescence from
A high-resolution zoomed view of one of my samples - all these weird
natural-looking pillars means that there was some serious micromasking going on.
Micromasking is what happens when I’m trying to etch away a material by
bombarding it with high-energy plasma, and little particles of dust or oil
A nano-landscape, made of dark strips of laser-melted areas, interspersed with
brighter less-damaged regions. I’m not sure what the mountain is made of -
maybe even the melted remains of a dust speck. You’d have to stack a thousand
of the mountains on top of each other to
Dust again! One of the amazingly varied forms that a single speck of dust can
take - they turn from specks to angular mountains, billowing sails, or fluffy
clouds. This one’s darker, smoother, and sharper than most… my guess would be
that it’s maybe a microscopic shard of
Nanosilverfish?
Someone asked me to post a picture of what one of my nanosamples should look
like - one that doesn’t have nanofluff or nanozombies or other weird
etching/dust problems. The reason I haven’t posted one before is that they look
kinda boring - when everything goes