Yesterday my contact at OU and I were able to perform a few different soaking tests in solvents in order to determine if they had any effect on the sample cleanliness. First, we characterized the surface using a Dynamic Interference Contract microscope and chose an area that could be found again. The DIC microscope is different in that it allows one to see various layers on a sample. So we were able to see that aside from multilayers of spheres there seemed to be another layer of stuff on the monolayers of spheres, which we believe to be left over surfactant from the solution used to layer the spheres. Then we let the samples soak in different solvents and air dry. Then we looked at the samples again under the microscope, looking for differences in bead number and whether or not we could see and "scum" on the surface of the beads. We saw that some of the solvents completely removed the spheres while others did very little. We saw that one sample had less of a scum layer than before, almost non at all by what we could see, but did removed most of the beads. However, this sample has enough on it to try etching with and see if our results improve from last time. My contact will be away next week but once he returns we may be able to do another series of etching!! On the other side of the project, the group at TU still has not been able to get the e-beam and the controlling computer to "talk" to each other yet. Therefore I will not be making a trip there this week, and instead will be trying to improve the cleanliness of the samples and the PMMA layer to etched once the e-beam is up and running.
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