Silicon Laboratory

An inner circle of six silicon atoms and an outer circle of 12 silicon atoms forming a lovely "Atomic Rose". Image taken by scanning tunnelling microscope at Bath by Duncan Lock.

Congratulations of Sarah and Rebecca, both graduating from the MPhy course. It was a pleasure to have you in the lab. Will you be back?

Recommended listening for this post:   Sometimes, life can feel like you're stuck in the part of the training montage where nothing is going right. No matter how much you "wax on, wax off", the finish on Mr. Miyagi's car...

As the building stage of the new Si lab chamber draws to a close, there is a final step - bakeout (info) - build an oven around your system and cook it for a few days. This process removes any...

Adrian Hooper kindly did his photographer bit yesterday and took some snaps of the group and the lab. Here they are. Be warned I have gone a wee bit OTT with some photo editing.

After about a year of hard work we finally have the Omicron LT-Q+ working at 77 K with a Q+ tip (albeit in STM mode). Here are some raw examples of the first images we have taken.

You can now, if you so desire, find me on: Google scholar link and ResearcherID

In hardback or on Kindle, a great read especially chapter 5, only £89 from Amazon (free P & P)

Can you leave a molecular switch to its own devices? We expose the not-so-passive influence of a scanning tunnelling microscope tip on a molecular switch. See: IOP for a summary Movie made from a time lapse series of scanning tunnelling microscope...