Visit to the SEM

Last Thursday my boss took me on a trip to a scanning electron microscope nearby that we had rented some time with. He wanted to check some carbon residue for carbon nanotubes, and to examine the epitaxy of a certain grown sample.

First, we looked at the carbon residue. It looked like soot, and under the SEM it looked very disorganized and splotchy. However, we did see some carbon nanotubes. They looked like white strings in the SEM. There were not as many of them as my boss had hoped, but it was still cool for me to see what a carbon nanotube looks like under and SEM.

The next sample was ever cooler. First we got a look at some crystals. We wanted to see whether they were arranged epitaxially, which, unfortunately, they were not. It was still cool to see the crystals up close. When we zoomed in further though, past the large crystals and into about a 100 nm scale, we saw odd shapes that looked almost like olives. This was really cool because we have no idea what they are, but we believe they may be some odd arrangement of carbon. Hopefully we will figure out soon what it was we saw, it could be some exciting discovery!