Prep. for Scanning Electron Microscope

Tomorrow is the ultimate test of everything I've done so far! I've been trying to figure out the orientation of nanorods with polarized light, but until now I haven't had an answer key to compare my results with. The nanorods are too small to determine how they are oriented with visible light, so we have to turn to something with an even smaller wavelength. That's where the scanning electron microscope comes in! Since electrons have a much smaller wavelength than visible light, we can create a topographical map of my sample. If the polarization method I've been working on matches the map, we win! 

To get ready, I prepared more nanorod samples on special, conductive slides. Today I took them into the lab and compared them with the regular glass slides to see if the nanorods were deposited correctly. That's where it got complicated. The conductive slides are much thicker than the glass slides and were impossible to view with the 40x objective we were using. The slides were so thick, we couldn't get the correct distance from the surface to focus and use the dark field condenser! I spent most of today trying to figure out how to get around that. For now, we just have to wait for a better objective, but I can still try to use the scanning electron microscope on the glass slides. It may not work out, since glass isn't conductive, but it is worth a shot! 

What you see here is a gif of the nanorods on the glass slides. The bigger, brighter spots are a conglomerate of many nanorods together. We can't extract the orientation since it averages out over so many nanorods. But the smaller "dots" you see flickering are single nanorods that we can use the polarization method on!