In May I have returned to AA7475/AlN nano-composites produced via powder metallurgy route and tried to develop a proper heat treatment for these materials. I started with a conventional heat treatment, characteristic for the matrix alloy, which is the T6 heat treatment (solution heat treatment + artificial ageing) and then moved to RRA (T6 treatment + retrogression and re-ageing) heat treatment and its variants.

Lately I have been on scientific internship in Institute of Catalysis and Surface Chemistry. During the internship I refined the annealing process of thin silver flms. I found apropriate resistance tube furnace.

I performed photochemical deposition on large area using Xenon lamp. I obtained particles size change from 60 to 80 nm with increased illumination time.
Thorough experiment with various concentration and time is planned on September.

I have learned new faster method of preliminary surface modification based on bath in 2:1 mixture of sulfuric acid and hydrogenperyoxide. Experiment were performed with 70nm silver nanoparticles. Good particles concentration was obtained but many aggregats occured.
In future I plan to compare this two typer of preliminary modifications.

In May I went to Porto to take part in EMAS 2013 13th EUROPEAN WORKSHOP on MODERN DEVELOPMENTS AND APPLICATIONS IN MICROBEAM ANALYSIS. This year EMAS workshops was organized with cooperation of LNEG - Laboratório Nacional de Energia e Geologia and SPMICROS - Sociedade Portuguesa de Microscopia. During the conference I have presented a poster on "SEM/EBSD MEASUREMENTS OF MICRO-STRAIN FIELDS IN Zn AFTER SEVERE PLASTIC DEFORMATION BY THE KoBo METHOD". Apart from presenting I have also attended multiple lectures and short presentations, most of which were concentrated on different aspects of micro-beam chemical analysis. Additionally I have participated in short EPMA course, which covered some basic knowledge on this method as well as some more advanced training with additional practical sessions with actual instrument.

My activities in May:

In May I had a pleasure to take the QEM 2013 curse. The workshop was held during two weeks, from Monday 13th to Friday 24th of May 2013.Place was extraordinary - Saint-Aygulf, on the French riviera. This school was devoted to advanced electron microscopy users. The lectures provided an exhaustive overview of up-to-date TEM techniques including mapping of elementals, strains and electromagnetic fields, four dimensions microscopies, and timely instrumental developments.

During last month I got another trial version of Lumerical FDTD Solution software.
Main objective was to investigate scattering and absorption cross sections of silver nanoparticles as well as near field distribution. 2 D simulations gave right results for small particles. But for bigger particles >100nm results was not simmilar to those from literature.

The sotware tool which allows to view the near field distribution around the nanoparticles was succesfully used. For the future this option ca ce used for plasmmonic resonaces determination.