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Douglas H Adamson

Publications and source records attributed to Douglas H Adamson.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Functionalized single graphene sheets derived from splitting graphite oxide.

A process is described to produce single sheets of functionalized graphene through thermal exfoliation of graphite oxide. The process yields a wrinkled sheet structure resulting from reaction sites involved in oxidation and reduction processes. The topological features of single sheets, as measured by atomic force microscopy, closely match predictions of first-principles atomistic modeling. Although graphite oxide is an insulator, functionalized graphene produced by this method is electrically conducting.

Electric Conductivity↗

Dynamics of pattern coarsening in a two-dimensional smectic system.

We have followed the coarsening dynamics of a single layer of cylindrical block copolymer microdomains in a thin film. This system has the symmetry of a two-dimensional smectic. The orientational correlation length of the microdomains was measured by scanning electron microscopy and found to grow with the average spacing between +/-1/2 disclinations, following a power law xi2(t) approximately t(1/4). By tracking disclinations during annealing with time-lapse atomic force microscopy, we observe dominant mechanisms of disclination annihilation involving tripoles and quadrupoles (three and four disclinations, respectively). We describe how annihilation events involving multiple disclinations result in similarly reduced kinetic exponents as observed here. These results map onto a wide variety of physical systems that exhibit similarly striped patterns.

Journal Article↗

Correction for piezoelectric creep in scanning probe microscopy images using polynomial mapping.

We describe a method for using polynomial mapping to correct scanning probe microscope images for distortion due to piezoelectric creep. Because such distortion varies from image to image, this method can be used when the actual locations of some features within an image are known absolutely, or in a series of images in which the actual locations of some features are known not to vary. While the general case of polynomial mapping of degree N requires the determination of 2(N+ 1)2 matrix elements by regression, we find that by understanding the mechanism by which piezoelectric creep distorts scanning probe microscope images, we can fix most of these coefficients at 0 or 1 a priori, leaving only 2(N+ 1) coefficients to be determined by regression. We describe our implementation of this strategy using the Interactive Data Language (IDL) programming language, and demonstrate our technique on a series of atomic force microscopy (AFM) images of diblock copolymer microdomains. Using our simplified scheme, we are able to reduce the effects of distortion in an AFM image from 5% of the scan width to a single pixel, using only five reference points.

Journal Article↗