• Question: Is it annoying to work with nano meter cables? How does it feel to work with matter that is so small?

    Asked by theo to Adam, Chris, Eleanor, Jessamyn, Sinead on 12 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Jessamyn Fairfield

      Jessamyn Fairfield answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      We use a lot of tools that are designed to manipulate stuff that’s really small. So when I’m getting ready for an experiment, usually my sample is on something small that I have to manipulate with tweezers. And the materials in the sample that I care about are too small to see visually, so I use electron microscopes to image nanomaterials.

      In practice, this means a lot of twiddling with things with your hands, and the accidental lost sample because you twitched or had too much coffee that day. But the feeling of working at such a small scale is pretty amazing, so I’d say it’s worth it.

    • Photo: Adam Murphy

      Adam Murphy answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      It can be really fiddly. I get images of my chips (like on my profile) Using what’s called an Atomic Force Microscope (which is an awesome name!) This microscope drags a tip across my surface, and the computer detects changes as it goes up and down, and I get my images out the other end!

      The thing is, the tip are tiny and it’s so fiddly to change them. I’ve so many by picking one up with tweezers and having it shoot out across the room (it didn’t want to be tip, it wanted to be an actress.). My chips are also really small, there’s one down the table at the side of my lab, it’s never coming back.

      But in the end I remember that I’m working with things that are millionths of a millimetre in size, and I control their shapes, easily. And that piece of awesome always makes me feel better!

    • Photo: Eleanor Holmes

      Eleanor Holmes answered on 12 Nov 2013:

      You can’t see the nano-stuff with your eyes so we all spend quite a lot of time looking through various microscopes. This can take a long time and be quite tiring.

      Sometimes even at the microscale things are tricky. You can just about see the microscale, your hair is about 60 micrometers thick. One of the things I have to to quite regularly is connect my nano-sized device up to a macro-sized (metre/centimeter scale) measuring device. I bridge the gap with micro-sized wires and tweezers. One time I actually connected a sample with a hair from my own head instead of the hair-sized gold wire. It looked exactly the same under the microscope! I was so embarrassed, luckily I noticed before I tried to pass any electricity through the sample. Human hair is not a great conductor.

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