SCSMM All Day Symposium – March 11 – Call for papers

John Richard PORTER / / LEXI

Southern California Society for Microscopy and Microanalysis Spring Symposium

The SCSMM will be holding its annual All-Day Symposium on March 11 at Caltech.  Our keynote speaker for the meeting will be Dr. Nicholas Ritchie of NIST talking about Desktop Spectrum Analyser II.  Dr. Ritchie is the MAS Tour Speaker.

SCSMM would like to invite local microscopists and microanalysts to submit titles and brief abstracts for both platform and poster presentations.  We will endeavor to offer a broad range of topics including both physical and biological sciences, SEM, TEM, FIB, and microanalysis themed talks.

The format will be similar to last year’s successful meeting at UCLA at which we had a combination of professional technical talks, student platform presentations and posters, and vendor talks.  We will initially offer one student platform slot for each local university.  Awards will be offered for the best student platform presentation ($500) and the best student poster presentation ($300) to support travel to M&M 2010 to be held in Portland, OR.  We ask that each university internally select their student for the platform presentation.

Please sent titles and abstracts to jrporter@uci.edu


Happy New Year

John Richard PORTER / / LEXI

Happy New Year to all LEXI users.  The year is starting out being very busy in our labs.  Everything is currently up and running and we look forward to training new users.  We also look forward to helping enhance the skills of our experienced users.

Our web site has undergone some extensive revision recently – thanks to Mai Ng – and we ask for your feedback as to how we can make the site better meet your needs.  Please let us know.

Opportunity to use hot stage on UltraPlus

John Richard PORTER / / Carl Zeiss Center of Excellence, Events, Seminars & Classes

Protochips (protochips.com) will be installing their Aduro hot stage in our UltraPlus SEM during the week of December 14.  This is originally designed for a TEM but it is also configured for SEMs.  Samples need to be small (0.5 mm square by µm’s thick preferably).  The ideal sample is probably best prepared by a FIB.  We intend to use it primarily for EBSD work at high temperature, but it doesn’t have to be.

If you have an interest in using this while it is here, and to learn more, contact John Porter.

UltraPlus Status

John Richard PORTER / / Instrument Status

Access to the UltraPLus will be very limited during December. This week, the microscope is going through its annual service and next week, Zeiss is hosting a class for its customers.

During the week of December 7, Zeiss is running a class and during the week of December 14, Oxford Instruments will be installing a hot stage and running experiments with its users. Of course, during the two weeks starting December 21, UCI will be closed although the lab will hopefully be available to experienced users with access cards.

If you need to reserve time and there is none available, please contact John Porter and we will try to accommodate you.

SBT Sputter Coater has returned!

Mai Ng / / Instrument Status

The SBT Sputter Coater with add-on ion polisher has returned.

This model utilizes the sputter door in place of mode for cycling the sample stage.

This means that cycling through modes with the blue button will reset the stage.

Remain on Depo mode during the entire run. Once the timer ends the stage will automatically turn the stage to face the sample away (as opposed to forward for depo).