Bleh cough cough

I have been a bit ill this week, so I missed a few days. I will now try to do them all at once.

On Friday I did some experiments on a sample I've been making for a while. I used Nice Little Microscope a.k.a. the 2010F, which is like the little microscope but bigger and better (wheelie chair included for scale):

Lots of buttons! And on the table is my lab book where I write down notes for every experiment I do so I can come back and check what I did later if I need to. Especially important if somebody gets a different result and needs to find out why.

This is what it looks like on the screen when you look at your sample:

That's the edge of my sample. (This is looking in through the the window at the front that is covered up in the picture of the microscope.) It is very very thin so the electrons can go through. The stripes at the edge are an effect of it getting thicker, like a beach. For the nerds: yes, I know it is out of focus. The material is made of quite light elements and the camera couldn't see the line on the screen when it was in focus.

What I wanted to find out with this sample, that somebody heated in a certain combination of gases, is whether there is a change in the number of oxygen atoms that are missing when you get to a boundary between two little crystals (grains). So I went to a boundary and (after a bit of faff) got an energy loss spectrum to compare with a normal bit of crystal. This is where you catch the electrons that came out the other side and measure how much energy they have lost from the energy you gave them at the start. That tells you what happened to them on the way through the crystal. In this particular material, if the features in a certain bit of the spectrum look more blurred, it's supposed to indicate more of the oxygen is missing. You get a graph like this:

It's pretty blurry but then it was a bit blurry in the normal bit too. So I have to do a bit more analysis on that before I figure out whether it's different or not. Then when I had done that I took a very high magnification image - LOOK, ATOMS!

That's on a TV screen that you can use to see more clearly than on the green screen. It's not quite atoms but it's a pattern the atoms make that is of the same size and orientation as themselves. I need to do some analysis on that pattern and see if it shows there are missing atoms or not, or if it in fact doesn't show anything one way or another, then I will have two different kinds of data to draw my conclusions from. (I also need to put a scale bar on it before I publish it anywhere!)

So that was Friday. At the weekend I decided the cough I had was not going away on its own, so on Monday I went to the doctor who agreed yes it might be a chest infection, so I have some antibiotics. Here is me pulling what is supposed to be a sad and slightly ill face but I look more like a surprised duck:

On Tuesday I was meant to be on the microscope again but I came in and it had burst a pipe and poured cooling water all over the floor, so I called Ian and we had to sort it out instead. Nothing broken in the end, just a lot of mess to clean up. So I am still iller than the microscope.

Today (Wednesday) I did some more sample prep on the samples I had been making last week. One of them was ready for the next step in the ion miller:

The sample goes inside through the airlock at the top and then the machine fires argon ions at it to mill away material really slowly and make it really thin like I showed in the microscope. You basically put the sample in, set it going for a few hours and just check it hasn't done something stupid every now and again.

Meanwhile a couple of other samples (the ones I had in the dimpler last week) were ready to be glued on supports so they will be ready for ion milling too, here they are on the messy lab bench:

After being trimmed slightly and cleaned with solvents, I use a little bit of super-pure glue (epoxy resin is ok for putting in an ultra high vacuum and zapping with an electron beam...the impurities in normal grade glue are not ok and will come off and make the inside of the microscope grubby) and stick the thin (not super-thin yet, just a bit thin) bits of material to little copper rings that will fit in the holders. They are under the glass lids to keep the dust off while the glue dries. The boxes on the top are just labels so I can tell them apart, one little round thing looks much like another!

So that is what I have been doing. Also coughing, and sleeping a lot :(

ps - The cats are safe! The fabulous Sheila and a team of super PhD students got together and adopted them properly, so now they are Our Cats. Yay cats!