sem - AI Weirdness (Page 2)

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By Janelle Shane On May 15, 2014 - 1 min read

The one on the left is a nanolaser, carved by high-energy plasma and strong acid, and invisible to the naked eye. The one on the right is a hoodoo, carved by wind and rain, and is approximately 20 million times larger. And about 60 million times older. The reason they

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By Janelle Shane On May 11, 2014 - 1 min read

It looks like it could be an image of desert badlands - except for that strangely translucent wall. In fact, this scene is much, much smaller. An ant could step over the wall without ever noticing its existence. This image was taken through an electron microscope, of a microscopic landscape

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By Janelle Shane On May 10, 2014 - 1 min read

Resembling arrays of flaming islands, these formations are actually microscopic, etched out of semiconductor. This semiconductor material is what we use to make microscopic lasers - we start with a vast, featureless sheet of semiconductor and cover certain areas with a protective layer of glassy photoresist. Then we blast the

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By Janelle Shane On May 09, 2014 - 1 min read

It resembles a mushroom cloud, but in fact, it’s one of our microscopic nanolasers, imaged under an electron microscope. These lasers are among the smallest in the world, so small you could fit a billion of them on an iPhone home button, small enough to one day fit easily

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By Janelle Shane On May 08, 2014 - 1 min read

Strange formations caused when high-energy plasma from a reactive ion etcher bombards semiconductor materials. We use the reactive ion etcher to carve out microscopic optical devices, like lasers and filters. Here, there’s no particular device that we were trying to make - we were just testing to see if

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By Janelle Shane On May 02, 2014 - 1 min read

The cliffs of fluffiness! Lashed by impossibly pointy nano-waves. The fluffy stuff at the top is actually photoresist, a glassy substance that we use to protect semiconductor from plasma bombardment when we’re doing our etching. Here, the photoresist protected the semiconductor below it from being etched away, making the

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By Janelle Shane On April 14, 2014 - 1 min read

Sometimes the view under an electron microscope can be positively scary. I’ll be scrolling along at low magnification, checking out some nanoscale features, when all of a sudden a colossus will loom huge above the nanolandscape. Sometimes I actually jump. Usually it’s a tiny microscopic speck of dust,

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By Janelle Shane On April 05, 2014 - 1 min read

The long valley, surrounded by jagged mountains, occupied by a picturesque leaning castle…. Actually, this is a closeup of a minuscule scratch in a coating of photoresist. At this magnification (2096x), it’s clear that the photoresist has a rough, mountainous surface, caused by the high-energy plasma I’d bombarded

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By Janelle Shane On February 25, 2014 - 1 min read

The beachgoers flee as hulking monsters climb from the dark water… This is a scanning electron microscope image of some various-sized pillars that appeared on one of my samples during a plasma etching test. They’re made of semiconductor, and the bright plain beneath is silicon. Showing through the dark

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By Janelle Shane On February 19, 2014 - 1 min read

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

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