Tom prepared two PVP coated TEM samples for me to image today. One of the samples was washed with dH20 and the other left untouched. Below is a series of three images, from left to right: no PVP, PVP no wash, PVP & wash.
I wasn’t able to tell any differences under the River Campus TEM, but perhaps the URMC Hitachi will give more contrast.
After our meeting with Professor Dumont on Tuesday it was decided that we needed to try and perform the BSA/DDM seperation with a more porous membrane (to allow for eventual pressurization). SC256 was choosen and as an initial step I ran a simple small dye diffusion experiment to verify that the pores were open. As…
Back in November we were visited by Tom Berkelman of BioRad to see if he could use our NPN membranes to successfully separate some proprietary nanoparticles from IgG in a solvent with secret ingredients. These particles have an interesting absorbance spectrum as well as strong fluorescence. During that visit and in subsequent separations in the…
I used the spectroscopic ellipsometer to measure several wafers deposited using the AJA system. I verified film uniformity as well as film quality using index of refraction as the metric. The term “w/ Bias” refers to an applied RF power over the substrate. The bias adds energy to the surface as adatoms re-arrange during deposition…
Today, I finally demonstrated liftoff of microporous SiOx from a bare Si wafer. The sample is a 2 x 2 cm section of wafer 209A02, which has a 100 nm layer of TEOS SiOx that stress stabilizing anneal. The film was patterned with close-packed ø3 µm pores (6 µm pitch) using S1813 resist, G-line stepper…
I repeated the autoclave experiment from earlier this week, but this time I also used the Sepcon format. I used wafer 662, which was contaminated with large spots. This was done in the oven in RPMI-1640 with FBS (no RTP). I think my 0 hour pictures were accidentally erased from the camera, but I think…
Thanks to SiMPore’s push for TEM grids, we’ve produced a lot of amorphous material in the last month under different deposition conditions. Below I’ve illustrated the different film structures resulting from depositing with and without substrate bias and heating. Without bias, the amorphous film exhibits clusters of thicker/denser? material (darker spots). Intuitively, this makes sense…
Comments are closed.
The first image has the most contrast, if you look at the background structure and the pores themselves. The second image has less contrast and only the larger, more defined features are clear. The third looks somewhere in between the other two, but this is subjective. It will be interesting to see what the URMC tool sees.
BTW – the loss of contrast implies that a potentially uniform, electron-soft film is covering the membrane. I guess the optical analog would be “translucent” film, causing some image blur.