Week 5: Shattered Pieces

Share This:

Saturday, June 27, 2015

By:

Veronica Martinez-Vargas

This week… hmm, I experienced my rite of passage into the research world. It took two days to prepare our dummy substrate--- exfoliate, characterize, take pictures, counter exfoliate, clean, characterize again, take pictures, counter exfoliate again, characterize once more, and clean again --- for it to be shattered to pieces within seconds before our transfer! For a more thorough explanation about our lab adventures please refer to Teresa’s blog, you will enjoy it. It has definitely been a fun learning experience nonetheless, we learned along the way that there were more factors at play that needed to be considered. We embraced the disasters and approached the process in a more systematic way, changing a few parameters here and there. We hope to test out two more possibilities next week before we completely move on to a different transfer approach. We just have to keep moving forward.  

Shattered dummy substrate with MoS2 flakes and PLLA layer.

 

Before realizing the PDMS layer did not attach to the PLLA layer, in other words, before becoming slighted frustrated.

 

 

Aside the lab mishaps, I have been pretty active this week. I did a fair amount of walking/dancing this week. On Monday, I attended the Bachata dance classes at Cafe Citron. On Wednesday, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival celebrating Peru commenced and I went to see afro-peruvian singer Eva Ayllón. Her music was beautiful, it was the light of the night bringing everyone to their feet to dance. On Friday, I went down to the festival once more and after eating Pollo a la Brasa and drinking Inca Kola, I visited the monuments once more ending my journey at Martin Luther King’s Memorial.

 

Veronica Martinez-Vargas