Allen J. Hall

The society formerly known as the American Vacuum Society (AVS) is holding their international conference in Boston, MA next week! And I’ll be there! [Exciting!] If you are going to be there, drop me a line on the blog and we can snag a coffee or beer together.

The programs and cards sent out may have a familiar image!

My AFM image of the CuInSe₂ Bicrystals I grow in our lab won second place in the Art-Zone competition last year! It was great fun! [Thanks goes to AVS for being a fantastic organization!]

Wish me luck with my talk!!

One of the things that makes a Scientist good at what he does (and sometimes gets him serious accolades) is effective communication and visualization of his data, results, and concepts. This is helpful for everyone from the business researcher to the teaching professor (to the graduate-student).

(You’ll never guess where this discussion is going, so click on through to read more and be surprised…)
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Well, I’m finally published in my current field.  It took a very very long time to get this paper published.  All sorts of reasons for the delay.  In fact, this work was originally started in 2004  (our first bicrystal was successfully grown in ‘04).  During research group meeting, I made an under the breath comment something akin to: “Well, darnit, it’s too bad we can’t study a single grain-boundary, because then everything would be so much easier…”  Prof. Rockett looked over to me and smiled: “But, Allen, we can study a single grain-boundary!  That’s a great idea!”  So, the bicrystal project was started.

We were able to obtain a bicrystal GaAs wafer from Wafer Technology Limited Co. (UK); I requested a bad growth, with crystallites as large as possible.  I’ll be forever indebted to the great guys at Wafer Technology for their quick grasp of what I was looking for.  After visiting our group in 2006, S. Seibentritt at HMI (now at Lüxenbourg) started similar work.

While this current paper isn’t perfect, it went through numerous revisions.  Most of the extensive EBSD calculations didn’t make the paper.  Subsequent papers will likely revisit the disorientation discussion.

Unfortunately, there was an error we missed in the proof.  The paper is currently missing Figure 2(c): The cross-sectional HRTEM image (the hard work of C. Lei).  The image can be found here: Cross-Sectional HREM image of Cu(In,Ga)Se₂ bicrystal, hosted at Prof. Angus Rockett’s research group’s webpage.

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