Volume 18, Issue 4 (July 2004)

The environmental scanning electron microscope has an advantage over other microscopy techniques since it allows in-situ study of fast processes and the analysis of liquid/ solid interfaces with higher magnification. The interaction of carbon nanofibers and carbon nanotubes with water and ethylene glycol has been studied at magnifications of up to 60,000X...

Micromorphology, a technique for studying consolidated, oriented blocks of sediments or soils with a petrographic microscope, has been used to study deposits from a variety of archaeological sites. In one instance, thin sections of deposits from what was supposed to be one of the earliest uses of fire in the world were analyzed for indications of in-situ burning...

To acquire real-time images from a confocal or 2-photon microscope, a resonant scanning mirror is used to generate the necessary fast horizontal laser scan line. Because the rotational velocity of this mirror is not linear but sinusoidal, it introduces distortion into an image that is acquired by digitization with a constant pixel clock...

Photonic crystals - materials that can manipulate light - have been intensively investigated. Photonic band gap (PBG) structures occur also in nature. Our attention focuses on butterflies as their wings manipulate light with the help of micrometre-sized scales...

Backscattered electron imaging (BSEI) provides an appropriate technique to get an insight into the growth histories recorded in magmatic minerals. A new preparation method presented here enables the growth imaging of all crystal faces by cutting single grains parallel and perpendicular to their crystallographic c-axes...