First day of summer classes and Research

Today was the first day of summer classes and research.  Doing research with only one class feels like you have more time, but it can be deceiving because of the amount of time you will spend for that one class due to it being so condensed.  Implemented a few new cleaning procedures today including a methanol soaking of cleaned silica pieces to remove any dust that may have settled in between bead deposition trials.  Once the beads have dried sufficiently we will try and soak the sample in methanol to try and loosen the SDS that also adsorbed to the sample.  This will make the etching process easier as well as remove any contaminants that stuck to the surface during the deposition process.