Yilin Wong
One chance led to the extraordinary discovery of spirals caused by chemical reactions that created small wrinkles. To the microscope, they are more beautiful than they seem.
A germanium tablet of 1 cm2 Covered with evaporated metal films in contact with a drop of water was left to discover, by night.
The student of UCLA (University of California) Yilin Wong woke up the next day and decided, out of curiosity, to give a look at the microscope: some weird points They had appeared, and Wong didn’t understand how.
What was not your surprise when you found that amazing spiral patterns They had been recorded on the surface of Germanium through a chemical reaction.
They were hundreds of spirals, almost identical. And the student immediately realized that small changes in experimental parameterslike the thickness of the metal film, they produced Different Standardsincluding Archimedes spirals, logarithmic spirals, lotus flower shapes, radially symmetrical patterns, among others.
Another forms that can assume the spirals
“I was trying to develop a measurement technique to categorize biomolecules on a surface through the breakdown and renovation of chemical bonds,” Wong tells. “Fixing DNA molecules on a solid substrate is quite common. I think no one who made the same mistake I looked by chance to the microscope. ”
Together with Professor Giovanni Zocchi, he then published a study that analyzes a system of evaporation of a 10 -nanomers thick chromium layer on the surface of a germanium cracker, followed by a 4 -nanome gold layer.
The investigation of the process revealed that the chromium and gold films were under tension and they had been deleted from Germanium as the catalytic reaction continued. The resulting tension created wrinkle In the metal film – these are responsible for the amazing images of spirals.
