I know this may not look like much, but I spent many hours slaving away in the lab to produce these results... and begged a random physics professor in the hall to first let me borrow his USB memory stick, and then trust me to locate him and bring in back within five minutes. It was quite the impossible task considering how large these picture files were and how many of them I had to transfer onto my laptop. Oh yes, and I spilled a large beaker of ethanol all over myself right before Stanishevsky walked in the room. Very classy, if I do say so myself.
Ahem. The results:
Basically it's two pictures of silver/carbon colloidal nanoparticles, deposited onto a titanium substrate. We're trying to find the set of conditions that helps the particles deposit best, testing specifically the concentration in solution, voltage across the cathodes, and deposition time. It all sounds very fancy, but the job is not glamourous. The cool part is analyzing the samples and using the microscope to take pictures... which is what we have above. If you'll look closely, the picture on bottom is composed of tiny little circles. Each of those is a sphere about 10-15 nanometers across, which is a meter to the -9th power.
The first picture is the same procedure, but the conditions allowed the particles to deposit too quickly... and when the system dried, it cracked to relieve the stress. It's incredible to think about because the stress is in microjoules... the amount a pressure a fly exerts on a counter top when it lands... but it's still too much for the arrangement to handle and fault lines appear.
Anyway, enough babbling in a foreign language.
I have to go back to writing this paper. :(
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