Week 8 July 17th - 23rd

Wow another week down. This is crazy that the end of the summer is just weeks away. This past week a lot was accomplished. I was able to collect more data than ever about the samples of Iron I am working with. To refresh people’s memory I am working with a thin film of iron on a silicon wafer. I etch it to make the thin film smaller and smaller. This week we made a 1% solution of the phosphoric acid to etch our samples. The 1% solution etched a lot slower and smoother than the 2 and 5 percent solution I had previously used. This made for cleaner data and the ability to see a trend easier. We determined that the etching had made the surface rough when we used the other concentrations that it gave us unusable data. On Tuesday I had to make graphs of the data to present to the person from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab who is collaborating with Dr. Nguyen on this project. At that same time he gave us a sample of meteorite for us to find the optical constants using the ellipsometer. That was cool to actually touch (with gloves on) a meteorite. I have collected all the data that I will collect. I am leaving on vacation today and so my next weeks work is to finish the presentation. I am excited for the presentations and look forward to seeing the accomplishments of the other interns as well as presenting what I have done.