Thought I’d share what life is like on the cutting edge of nanotechnology with the rest of the internet. I have a short breather while I wait for my solutions to de-oxygenate.
Two months ago I started a side project. It has become my thesis research. It is also totally and completely ballin’. It’s nanotech to the extreme. Plently of people are fabricating nano things with other nanothings, like putting little nanoparticles (very small rocks) on the nanorods or nanotubes (heh. I said “rod.”). Nanotubes are typically on the order of 25 nanometers in diameter and several hundred nanometers long. In my world, that’s big. Also, nanoparticles that people typically work with are on the scale of 3-5 nanometers in diameter. That’s also on the large size, in my world. The nanoparticles I make are all clusters of 55, 147, and 240 atoms, and are all less than 1.7 nanometers in diameter. The difference between a 1.7 nm cluster and a 5 nanometer cluster is several hundred atoms. In my area of study, analytical chemistry of materials and surfaces, several hundred atoms is a huge difference. In fact, as small a difference as 10 atoms can be significant when considering the relationship between composition, structure, and properties on this end of the nanoscale. I can’t disclose fully what my research entails, because I’d like to publish it and earn the right to say “I did it first, nyah nyah,” so I’ll speak loosly about some of the details. Roughly, what I do could be considered ultra-nano fabrication. While it’s pretty high tech to modify 20 nm wide nanotubes with little clusters, (nanofabrication, if you will), ultra-nano fabrication would be taking a 1.7 nm particle and decorating different parts of it’s surface.
Yes, my head is very big right now. But I happen to think I’m entitled to go on this ego trip.
Anyways, it’s not all glitz and glam. I just got back from my second chiropractor appointment this week. Finally feeling pretty good in the neck area, hopefully it will get me through another weeks worth of bending over the potentiostat. Just under 2 weeks to go until I’m off to the synchrotron, and one co-worker on the project just got back from having H1N1 for a week and a half, and my other co-worker just left for the weekend for family time. We’ve been stressin’ to get stuff done. To top it all off, we got the “drop everything you’re doing right now” email from the boss on Monday because, due to a mix up, our deadline for submission was moved from February 1, 2010, to this past Wednesday. We got the grant written and submitted with 28 minutes to spare.
I’m still learning my way around this electrochemistry thing. My experiments are working, but they could always work better. I have a full plate with trying to get a paper out and preparations for the synchrotron studies, and everytime I show data that I think is good enough, the boss wants me to tweak it “just one more way.” It’s never just one more thing to try. I’ve been saying that I’m about one more solid week of data collecting from having enough for this paper, and that keeps getting pushed back. I realized that my eyes are bigger than stomache in lab right now; there’s no way I can do the series of experiements that I want to do and prepare the synchotron samples at the same time. So, now, it’s more like I’m a month and a half away from having the data I need for this paper. Once I realized that I would have to cut my work load down by half, my headache shrunk by about half as well. Imagine that! While I’d love to get it all done and have my cake and eat it to, it’s just not going to happen. I need these synchrotron experiments to go as well as they possibly can. It’s all going in my dissertation, anyways. It’s still hard – and has always been a personal difficulty – to slow it down, and take a few steps back. Especially when I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
The synchrotron will be a fun time. It’s a huge structure, and working on the beamline, as we call it (it’s a monochromatic x-ray beam) is like being inside an instrument. I’m not sure if regulations will allow me to post pictures (my guess is not). We operate 24/7 in shifts. The nifty thing is watching the experimental results appear before your very eyes. Visualizing the interference of wavepackets and seeing them yield the pay-dirt at 3 am is totally invigorating. Makes it all worth it.
That’s all I have time for right now.
Lissa – let me know if you want to meet up with me and Clea in NYC when I’m done experimenting!
