During the last month I was preparing the postconference paper. Since the confrence materials from EMRS 2014 symp. I could be published in journal "Sol-gel science and technlogy" the proposed paper was entitled "Photochemical silver nanoparticles deposition on sol-gel TiO2 for plasmonic properties utilization". Just after the paper submition I was preparing the scientific project proposal to National Center of Science. The project on " The process parameters influence on photochemical deposition of metal nanoparticles on the surface of titanium dioxide on plasmonic properties of obtained nanostructures" which was the continuation of results enclosed within the submitted paper.
Within the experimental part I stated depostion from freshly obtined solution from Institute of Catalysis PAS.

This month I was preparing to pass the final examination of PhD in the field of materials science. After passing the exam I got involved in writing the article to Materials Science and Engineering. To do so, I had to first complete the experiment with plane stress compression. All experiment works were done before the end of the month.

Participation at International Meeting: CALPHAD and THERMAM. Presentation of results of liquid binaries including atomistic calculations and those based on classical equation of atoms movement. They were compared to measured data. These studies were also supplemented by semi-empirical considerations.

I May I was studying various models which link
macroscopic boundary parameters to energies of boundaries.
I've written a piece of software that
assumes an energy function with some free parameters
and tries to fit the model to data from
molecular simulations available in literature.
This will allow for determination which model
describes best the relationship between geometry and energy.

In may I had some more opportunity to exercise with in-situ annealing of titanium samples inside FEG SEM with EBSD capabilities. This time we decided it would be interesting to perform heating with heating ratio similar to one used for DSC measurements and at specific temperatures where we expected something to happen (from DSC results) quickly cool down the sample, measure EBSD map and then repeat for the next temperature. We did as we planned and even with some problems with driting we managed to obtained some decent results. It seems however that this kind of experiment with titanium is strongly affected by surface oxidation which means big problem for diffraction image quality. On the other hand it seems possible that contamination mark on sample surface, created during preceding EBSD scan can have some inhibiting qualities when it comes to oxidation during sample heating.