To celebrate 50 years of lasers, Radio NZ had a laser-centric feature during ‘Our Changing World’ on Thurday, 09 December. Cather was one of the three guests invited to speak along with Kylie Price from the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research and Justin Hodgkiss from Victoria University. The story can be heard here.
Last week, Cather traveled to Wellington for the 3rd Running Hot conference on creating value with research. As part of the conference, she sat on a panel with two other researchers – Christine Jasoni from Otago and Marc Tadaki from Auckland – to discuss the New Zealand environment for new and emerging researchers. The panel discussion was led by Bryan Crump, of RadioNZ Nights fame, and can be heard here.
A photographer from the Faculty of Science came and took pictures of the lab. We’ll need to photoshop Josh and Fraser in, though. We all enjoy being in the lab … we’re smiling, see?
This year, Dr. Justin Hodgkiss and Dr. Cather Simpson decided to team forces across the North Island and teach ultrafast spectroscopy via video link. We’ve just finished the 6-lecture block, and (with a few minor glitches) it worked very well! We’ll see what the ~30 students have to say at the end of the semester, but we enjoyed it so much that we’re already planning next year’s class.
“Congratulations to Dr. John Payton! Cather Simpson traveled back to the US to attend the successful dissertation defense of her last Ph.D. student from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.”
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Greetings to the CHEM750 students – Micro and Nanofabrication at the University of Auckland. Please log into your class resource site to find summaries of your lectures, useful papers, and recommended online sources of information. We will be discussing your lab projects soon … be thinking of what you might like to do!
You can go directly to the site here. You can also get there from the toolbar at the top.
Cheers,
Cather
We soon will be expanding the positioning and resolution capabilities of the photon factory by installing an additional X-Y stage from Physik Instrumente (PI). The stage uses PI’s patented NEXACT PiezoWalk technology to achieve high resolution and long travel distances:
The photo to the left shows the creation of a positive lithography mask, cut using the PF µ-machining system by Cosmin Laslua.The photo illustrates our first attempt to create a new process. Namely, large area removal of a thin film with the excimer laser system. The light brown discoloration shows evidence of a residual chrome dust on the surface of the glass. We are currently investigating ways to improve this process and more thoroughly remove the residual metal. We think this can be accomplished through the addition of processing gas to our µ-machining system or with post machining chemical etch methods available in the new UA microfab. The photo below shows the fidelity of the laser cutting process. The laser cut interdigitated electrodes have a width of only ~ 5 µm. This represents a 1000:1 scale difference between these channels and the the largest (5mm) features in the above picture. This was accomplished with a multilayer CAD drawing and a realignment of the PFµM cutting mask size. You can also see the residual chrome dust coloring the above image in the cleared 5mm x 5mm regions.
Our first project! Here you can see the JPSA system cutting our first chrome on glass mask for Cosmin Laslua. The small blue spark is the 248nm light fluorescing as a thin layer of chrome is ablated from the surface of the glass microscope slide. This will produce a positive mask, though which light can expose a photoresit.
