Let’s get this thing started. This is a new blog which will be used to act as a frontpage for my projects. Since I have a few years of interesting stuff worth posting, I’m going to post old things every week. Each of these posts will be categorized as “backlog” and will be dated if possible.
I will start this with a gif I found from one of my old experiments.
This video was taken using my cellphone of a sample inside our UHV-XPS. What you are looking for is in the center of the image. There is a dark square which has some glowing spots. The dark square is uranium oxide powder which is held to the sample holder by an advanced fixative (double-sided scotch tape). In this image, we are not running the x-ray source. Instead, we are blasting the surface with electrons to clean it off for the analysis. In this process, a beam of electrons are shot at the sample, and the energy imparted will remove any adsorbed contaminants one layer at a time. When we shoot these electrons at uranium oxide, there is a luminescent phenomenon. The incident electron knocks around the electrons of the molecule and the molecule wiggles away the energy by ejecting a photon. This one happens to have a pretty green glow, which unfortunately doesn’t come across in the gif.
Another interesting part of this is the way the glowing portion seems to go from one blob, to two blobs, then back again to one blob, and so on. This appearance is due to the shutter speed of the camera. The electron gun is programmed to raster the beam across an area. Imagine rastering an area similar to mowing a lawn. You push the mower back and forth in lines to cover the area of the lawn. Our electron beam is sweeping across the uranium oxide like a high voltage power-washer. It just so happens that the zig-zag of this sweeping pattern syncs up with the shutter speed of the camera in such a way as to make it appear like there are little dancing blobs. Pretty neat!