Microscopes Galore

As the uni closes for Christmas break (I'm actually not allowed back here until early January! So there might be a gap in the posting if I don't get myself to an internet cafe), I realize that I have put nothing up about the work I've been doing. And yeah, I've been working too, not just having a vacation by the sea!
I'm using as many of the instruments as I can in the Electron Microscopy Unit here while working with postdocs in Michael Ferry's group on a few aluminium* projects. I don't think I am supposed to say yet exactly what alloy these
SEM and EBSD images show, but nice colors, hey? (It's cool material-wise too! We'll submit a paper early next year.) The microscope I used for these is amazing. I just need to find a way to get a few million dollars so we can have one at Mudd.

I'm also doing a bit of analysis on our samples from the Los Alamos speckle interferometer work. Laurel and Rob, check this out - it's an AFM image of a random spot on the well-crept sample A6. Shading shows altitude - look how the grains are rotated! Wish we'd been able to collect the out-of-plane data..

Anyway, now time for time off. Not sure what I will do for the next few days (weather looks a bit dodgy) but then after Christmas I'm going camping in the Snowy Mountains (not actually snowy in summer) for a few days, moving to my new place (situation at the old one still unresolved, so there is going to be a double rent period unfortunately), heading to a friend's beach house north of Sydney for New Years, and then going to Toowoomba to spend time with Janice and Peter and his brother and watch the cricket. Back from all that on 7 January and you'll hear all about it here!


*How did we get to calling it aluminum? AluminIum, as they say here, matches the naming of other elements better.