Attraction to figures
It’s latest in an unusual sense. It’s not the research work that I’ve been doing recently and is not even data taken in the last couple of years. But it is data left over from my thesis work. We’ve had a paper that’s been, well... languishing, for some time now. However, there’s been a nice little lull over the past weekend and I’m very excited to finish off this paper.
So what are you looking at above? Basically our friends Olav and Eric grew a series of 6 magnetic samples with increasing roughness (disorder), but otherwise identical. The higher the pressure during sample growth, the more disorder in the samples. On the left you can see reflectivity curves (literally measuring x-rays reflected specularly from the sample) for a few of the samples. The two low pressure (3 and 7) show nice fringe structure, well defined peaks, and slower decay. The two shown high pressure samples show no (or little) fringes, weak peaks, and quick decay in the scattering. All of that tells us some of properties as the disorder increases. On the top right is a plot of the magnetic domain structure imaged using a magnetic force microscope for all 6 samples. For the lowest disorder samples there is a well defined domain structure and for the high pressure samples the domains get more disordered. The bottom right is a plot of the surface roughness of the samples. Those data points are actually determined from the plot on the right hand side.
Actually the above figure is one of the “background” figures that we use to explain the basics of what went into the experiment. So there’s not anything new in it. Nonetheless the figure came out nicely and I thought it deserved to be immortalized here.