I’m not sure how many people in the current group have read all the papers that we have published, but a critical one was a JACS paper from Shigeru Amemiya where he used his Scanning ElectroChemical Microscopy (SECM) to probe…

Here’s a cropped image from a recent TEM pic that Brian McIntyre took of our material for SiMPore (15 nm thickness, not sure what wafer).  This particular feature caught my eye because the crystal is perfectly aligned so we are…

I did some imaging on the URinc TEM today and took the nice image below from wafer SC021.  I wanted to see the correlation between highly diffracting (dark) crystals in our standard lower resolution TEM and the lattice fringes observed…

As many of you know, we have been having a lot of trouble with the new etch cell and have not been able to produce high quality membranes. Yesterday, we discovered that the stainless steel used to fabricate the new…

I think some of us have been confusing each other in our discussions of the dependence of flow rate on pore radius. Jim thinks in terms of a single pore, and I agree that there is an r^4 dependence. Therefore,…

Dave and I tested 8 wafers (187, 189, 310, 316, 318, 325, 327, 329) from the last 3 runs and traces of copper can be found within all the wells. However, the amount and position of this contamination varies greatly,…

This is probably not of general interest, but for the sake of full disclosure, I have spent considerable time working with our wafer supplier (Virginia Seiconductor) to resolve some issues regarding the surface quality of their wafers. It would have…

After the w310 series being beautiful (few pinholes, reasonable strength, high yield), we have retreated somewhat with a return of the copper-related piholes. Here is an SEM image and EDX scan from the well wall: Here is a pic of…

I think the consistently low flow rates are a real bottleneck for all our fluid based experiments and must be overcome. On the production side, we are really pushing the limits of our capabilities to produce the current membrane geometry,…

There is strong evidence that the recent pinhole breakout is due to copper contamination in our process. I have attached two image – An SEM showing a cuprous creature eating one of our membranes and an EDX (Energy Dispersive X-ray?)…