AFM studies show that the highest roughness is obtained fo a silicon wafer textured in acid solution contains 8HF:1HNO3:1H2O. Process time was 1 minute - this is a relatively short period of time leading to a significant reduction in production costs. AFM investigations are consistent with reflection measurements - the higher roughness the higher reflection decrease.

Main activities carried out during September:

- preparation of an article from the results obtained so far
- preparation of the presentation for the 9-th Polish-Japanese Joint Seminar on Micro and Nano Analysis in Sieniawa

As July and almost two week holiday I took faded away like a distant memory, I started to organize results obtained so far and thinking what to do next. Since there was quite a big discrepancy in observations regarding KoBo-ed zinc, a decision was made that new investigations should be conducted. Especially troubling was incoherency in grain sizes observed on different scans taken from different part of sample. New scans was taken along the radius (almost 1 mm) of the Zn wire in both transverse and longitudinal sections of sample. This was aimed at finding whether grain size varies along radius (as it might be expected after deformation that incorporates twisting of extrusion die).
No such tendency was observed. However I found out that microstructure consist of small, equiaxed grains (around 10 microns) embedded inside much bigger (above 150 microns) ones. This kind of microstructure is quite queer and definitely isn't typical for single phase material. Other interesting observed feature is aligning of some small grains into straight intergranular lines. Both of those observations need careful further analysis in order to determine their origin and underlying physical mechanism.

In August, I continued my investigations of balled-milled powders after different milling periods. I also performed some TEM investigations of compacted ball-milled aluminium powder with magnesium nitride addition hoping to find any evidence of AlN formation during milling/hot pressing of powders but without any luck.

This month I was focused on investigations of tetragonal ZrO2 samples received from AGH. These are preliminary studies carried out to obtain information about measurement parameters that are necessary for successful experiment.