This seems like quite a long night as nothing terrible has happened. Thankfully!

I'm taking the last of our scattering data for the TiO2 samples, at least the last of it for this beamrun. We lose our photons at 8am, so I've only got a few hours remaining. I hope it's enough to get what we need.

In the intervening minutes I've got time to work on my talk for next week. I must admit to being a little nervous about it. This will be the first time I really get to present my work on gold surfaces to a general audience of other scientists and it's a big step for me. I remember what it was like the first time I presented my thesis work and this isn't nearly as bad. However, there's still some pressure.



and speaking of that talk (a pun Kerri would be proud of)...

I've been digging up pictures for use in it. I pulled up more of our microscopy images from a few months back and decided to post this one here as well. The little white blobs in the picture are actually individual gold atoms on the surface of a gold crystal. There's quite a bit of noise in the picture and it's actually not the greatest quality. However, I've been primarily an x-ray scattering person and so for my first foray into direct imaging of atoms that's not too bad. The whole image is about 4 nanometers on each side. The atoms are arranged in a hexagonal pattern which is actually different from at more square arrangement below them (technically "more square" means face-centered-cubic or cubic-close-packed).

The cicadas have invaded the APS. Last night there were hundreds right by the door I use. This morning there were more out on one of the trees. I managed to actually find a white one. I think they're supposed to be fairly uncommon (at least this is the only white one I've seen). By the time I came back and had a camera he had been smushed by a passing car or person. While trying to take a picture of the tree, many of the little guys decided I made a good tree and attempted to perch on me. I did not agree with their assessment and quickly dispatched