lrose's blog

This is the first day of the conference.  5 junior and senior high school teachers are attending.  The video to introduce nanotechnology (http://vimeo.com/12622654)   it very good.   Any student would understand how small nano scale is.   We will explore how object that are less than 100 nanometers in size act and react with the surroundings.

We spent a lot of time today talking to each other and describing what we do and how we investigate the nano world.   We  will introduce each of the scopes we use and use some microscopes that are computer driven .

Dr. Marya Lieberman talked to us about the history of nanotechnology.    One of the early researchers,  Schon,  was shown to have falsified the data.  In spite of this set back,  molecular electronics have progressed and give a vision for  what might the future might be for nanoelectronics.  Very interesting !!

Dr. Lieberman discussed what her experiment envisions it can do.

“The goal is to have the computers in 20 years to be unrecognizeable as compared to todays computers– just like the ENIAC programmers in 1947  would not recognize the desk top computers we are working on today.”

Michael Crocker introduced the topic of Scale and orders of magnitude.  We discussed how orders of magnitude  change the world and the effect that things have on their surroundings,

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June 29 –This is the apparatus that Becky and I built to irradiate the samples.  the chamber that hangs down is where the Polonium and the sample are housed.  The nitrogen gas is passed through the  tube-like top chamber and the glove is attached to pressurize the chamber to insure that nitrogen fills the chamber.  we put a whole in the glove for the nitrogen to slowly escape.  

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this summer we are trying to find out what happens to surface atoms when they are irradiated.  We need to know  what the damage looks like,  how big an area is changed, what the margins look like and  how much time is optimum to expose a sample to  be able to learn these things.

There are a couple of interesting applications for this information.  One is with living cells.  How much of a cell is damaged by alpha particles?  Can it be directed to interact in specific areas?  Can we focus the distruction so it effectively removes one layer of atoms?

More tomorrow on what has already been done.

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To do this Tom we would need to come up with and activity and the pre- and post-tests.  What do we want  the students to know when we are done?   How do we make it relevant to  students daily lives?    I like the idea of a 1 or 2 day mini class on scanning?  With only 2 STM’s  how do we get a class of 30 students to participate?

I will have to look at the standards to see where this would fit.    Where does scanning tunnelling microscopy fit in an energy them?   Maybe it would fit better in the electrical energy and magnetic energy unit?

Just thinking aloud,  why do we need to scan any surface at an atomic level?   What does it tell us that we can’t see with the SEM or the AFM?

The more I run the STM the more questions I have.   I come up with more questions than answers.  we have started a schedule of operation.   I think anyone could begin to run the STM on simulation.  But to actually scan a sample of something that we want to discover something about is much more difficult because you are not sure what you are supposed to see.  I’ve worked with this one for 6 weeks and I still do not feel  confident.  I do not know how to verify my data.   Analysis of the scans  is still a mystery.

Lynda

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It took a lot more work to get both scopes operating than I thought.  But both scopes are working as of Friday.

I  don’t feel like I have accomplished much this summer.   If we can have a process that helps students see and begin to understand how we use this technology to understand how the world works,  it would be great.

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July 10, 2009

after several hours of changing tips, reseating the sample  and turning the sample on the holder,  I finally go it to scan my sample.  we prepared the sample by making a .331 molar solutions of CS2  and di-n-octylamine and adding them together in equal amounts.

Then put an annealled gold sample into the solution for 12 or more hours.  This time we put the sample in about 4pm on the 8th and took it out about 9:30 on the 9th.

The sample was preserved in a sample bottle enclosed in aluminum foil.  I tried to scan it on the 9th with very little success.  After manipulating the controls and the sample,  about 10:00 I finally got it to start scanning something that looks like gold layers.

These pictures have raised lots of questions in my mind about some of the structures I see and what I don’t see.  I expected to see monolayers of dithiolcarbonmates, in similar patterns to the octothiols we scanned last year (with permission and help from Annette Raigoza using her research project), but I did not see any layers that looked like those.

Questions:

What are those light specks in that seeminly flat area?

Is the large white cloudlike structure in the middle just trash?

Why won’t the STM let me scan area larger than 456nm?

As soon As I figure out how to save the pictures so I can copy them,   I’ll put one up

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