• Question: What are the thinnest materials that you use in your experiments?

    Asked by einstein1011 to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Sandra, Thanasis on 11 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by queeneva, aliceredington17, leah1, isu786.
    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 11 Mar 2013:


      I don’t use thin materials that often in my experiments, but one thing I do use is gold. If you want to see really tiny details on a fossil then you can use a machine called a ‘scanning electron microscope’. This fires beams of single electrons at a specimen, the electrons interact with the atoms at the surface of the specimen that you put in there and then detectors see where the electrons go and use this information to build a picture of what you are looking at, but in really tiny detail (as small as 1 nanometer sometimes!). The problem is that the types of atoms that fossils are made of don’t interact with the electrons very much so it doesn’t really work. To solve this problem I spray paint a layer of gold on to the specimen, because it stays the same shape as the surface so you can still see the shape, but it also interects really well with the electrons. This layer of gold has to be really really thin, just 10 or 20 nanometers across, so that’s the thinnest material I use.

    • Photo: Sandra Phinbow

      Sandra Phinbow answered on 11 Mar 2013:


      I make some really thin things. We have to cut tissue really thinly so we can put it on a microscope slide, stain it and look at it to see the cells.

      The sections are around 3 micron thick. Which is 3 millionths of a metre.

      It’s hard to explain so heres a short vid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnMdSgd5mts

      The music is terrible so dont have your speakers on!

    • Photo: Thanasis Georgiou

      Thanasis Georgiou answered on 11 Mar 2013:


      The materials I use in my experiment are only one atom in thickness- less than one nanometre (one billionth of a metre) – that’s as thin as you can get in the universe.

      There are different materials that can have this one-atom-only form, which we generally refer to as “2D” materials, because the don’t have the third dimension – the have length, width, but no apparent height (thickness),

      The first such material that was found is graphene. Graphene is just a single layer of carbon atoms. We make graphene by repeatedly peeling graphite, which is the material you write with when you use your pencils!

      In fact, you probably made graphene when you wrote with a pencil, but because graphene is really hard to find it took scientists a long time to find it!

      Graphene is a wonder material – is it the strongest material that we know (stronger than diamond), yet it is stretchable and transparent, it is the lightest, it conducts electricity better than copper.. and many many other exciting properties.

      Here’s a nice youtube video explaining graphene very nicely

    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 11 Mar 2013:


      Thin things…hmm, I don’t think I can really call anything that I use as thin compared to the other answers! Most of my work uses data, maps and computers!

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