Diamonds in the rough...

[morsla]

I'm procrastinating work, by doing less important work. My conscience is happy (things are getting done), but I'm beginning to feel a little worried.

One of the last SEM shots that I took - a closeup (1500x) of a tiny diamond, surrounded by (ex)garnets. The garnet is a little worse for wear, as it had a bath in hydrofluoric acid when the sample was prepared...

Must... keep... writing...

Comments

SEM

[sugar-plum-fair.livejournal.com]

I took an SEM shot recently, it was for biology though, we took a look at a kidney cell.

Learning about SEMs and TEMs was tedious. I mean you have to do so much crap to get the sample ready to look at.

[morsla.livejournal.com]

One advantage of photographing diamond, I guess - I didn't need to mess around coating the specimens with carbon :) Just stick 'em down with double-sided tape, and slot the batch into the machine...

Just as well, as I took about 50 shots that day...

Coating specimens

[sugar-plum-fair.livejournal.com]

I thought you needed to coat SEM specimens (biological ones that is, as I am learning about for my biology subject) with heavy metals, to get the secondary electrons. Does carbon do the same thing as heavy metals in terms of coating?

At RMIT I really wanted to play with the gold coating machine, but that wasn't part of our pract *sulks*, that was the only part I was interested in.

How come you don't need to coat diamond? Yes I know it's carbon. Hmm you've made me think of SEM in a different light.

Re: Coating specimens

[morsla.livejournal.com]

Biological specims do need coating. Inorganic ones don't always need it, though. I suspect that you know more than I do about SEM, if you're actually studying it... I just use it (very occasionally) to take surface images of samples.