Let me give you a piece of my mind.
Let me know if any of you learn anything useful from this, other than the fact that I'm cynical and sarcastic. That's no secret.
As the person who runs the digital electron microscopy facility at the school here, one of the things I have to do is train faculty, grad students, and industry clients on how to use some of the equipment. Some of them ( Read more... )
As the person who runs the digital electron microscopy facility at the school here, one of the things I have to do is train faculty, grad students, and industry clients on how to use some of the equipment. Some of them ( Read more... )
Now that I'm a bit more rested, I still have to say that the comments section of this post make my brain go "buhhhhh" a little, but bear in mind that I've never taken a Physics course (I haven't really seen anything like it since high school, though, when I had Physical Science, which I excelled in and loved), and I struggle with Chemistry. I may or may not need a Physics course before I graduate. If I find myself short on credits one semester, I might pick one up.
Just to be clear, the SEM image a representation of the resulting x-rays? Did I understand that correctly?
That's pretty neat, though. And the way you explained it? It'll stick with me for awhile. I'm going to memory-mark this, too. :) Thanks!
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Actually, the purple image below is from the electrons (the ones knocked out of orbit or reflected off the sample's surface.) There are 2 separate detectors that pick those electrons up (secondary and backscatter detectors) to form images like the purplish one (which was Photoshopped to add color, btw).
The X-Rays do not form an image, they result in the graph (the second picture), since those are simply counted and plotted with the X-axis being the energy of the X-Ray and the Y-axis being the number of X-Rays.
Imaging (from the secondary and backscattered detectors) and EDS (from the EDS detector) are separate analysis methods, but they sort of go hand in hand, because without the imaging capability, you'd have no idea what you were looking at on EDS. Think of it this way: you have a detector that can count smart people vs dumb people and it can do this without looking at them (from pheromones or whatever). You use a camera to take a picture of a crowd of people so that you know what you're analyzing. You can even do pinpoint analysis. Say you want to focus on a half a dozen people in the upper left corner of the crowd. The EDS detector can tell you if that small group is, as a whole, smart or dumb.
I'm sorry this explanation is a bit lame. I just got up and am not as creative when I'm tired. :)
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