Week 5

This week one of my childhood dreams came true. Also, I made good progress on my project. My childhood dream was to work in a place where I had to wear a lot of different things to prevent me as a person contaminating anything around. I needed to go into a clean room to make a new sample. My advisor was out of town and so another man in my division Oleg who does a lot of work in the clean room took me over and showed me the place. It was the highlight of my week to see all the different things that go on in there and to see the process of how my samples are made. I had heard about sputtering but I didn’t really know how it all worked. My samples have a 200nm thick thin film of iron on silicon and so we use e-beam sputtering to put that thin of a layer on the silicon wafer. For those who don’t know what sputtering is it is a process where a metal or other substance being deposited on a target. In my case the iron is being deposited on the silicon target. The electron beam is shot at the iron and then the iron is excited and sputters onto the silicon. With the samples I use phosphoric acid to etch off a little bit of the iron. Earlier this week I found out that I cannot leave my sample in for longer than 30s or the whole layer of iron is off. This is good to know because then I can know what increments of time I etch the sample. I hope this week to make a lot more scans and try to find another acid to etch with to see if it will not etch it off so fast. This will allow us to get more scans because we can change the thickness of the sample at a smaller rate than we currently are. I am excited for what is coming and I can see good progress every week.
As far as me doing anything exciting this week, there were a couple of things. The barbeque at the Dylla’s was full of good food and good conversation. I was able to spend more time with the interns and meet more people that work at AIP. On Friday the other interns came to NIST and it was fun to see what else happens there besides the projects in my division. Also, it was nice to be able to show the interns where I work. I have high hopes for a good week ahead and will be waiting to fill everyone in on my progress.