Submitted by Administrator on Wed, 28/09/2016 - 15:08
Clare Collins, 3rd year PhD, was awarded the prize for ‘Special Commendation’ for her image of Carbon nanotube jellyfish in The Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition in the micro-imaging category.
Clare writes: "Seemingly a swarm of jellyfish, this image was actually created using carbon nanotubes grown in a pillar formation. The metal disks that make up the jellyfish bodies are made by ‘sputtering’ charged aluminium and iron ions onto a surface to deposit a thin film of the metals. The carbon nanotubes grow from this thin disk.
The disks are 5 micrometers in diameter – 5 1/1000ths of a millimetre – and are 10 micrometers apart. If you zoomed out of the image, you would be able to see that they make up part of a 2 mm x 2 mm pattern across the surface of a silicon chip.
I research carbon nanotubes to study the emission of electrons, called the field emission, from a number of different configurations. The applications for field emission could be for displays or as X-ray sources."
Story first published on the Royal Society website.