Atomic Force Microscope [video] | Hacker News Reader

Atomic Force Microscope [video]

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122 pointsmhb18 comments

I'm always happy to see one of my videos on HN! I'm really glad to be getting back into the habit of making new videos. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. See you at Open Sauce!

Thank you so much for all the work you do for us.

Your videos are extremely cool. Please keep going!

I was a K6-12 science teacher since back before youtubes existed and it's so great to see educators whom genuinely enjoy sharing their passions with others.

Keep it up! I know from experience (nowhere even near yours [†]) that these videos are grueling labors of love.

[†] Couple of million-view+ viral OC hits, decades ago (god! we get wise too late and old too soon)

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My favorite part of this specific video of yours is that you give a "spoiler alert" early on, referencing a prior video (which I really enjoyed, too) [SPOILER ALERT]: the holograms you previously made are in fact flat =|

Very cool. Thanks for using this incredible medium to continue sharing your passions!

In my first internship, with a hard disk drive company, I learned how to use an Atomic Force Microscope to measure the roughness of the hard drive platter (the disk). The texture variation is in the order of angstroms or nanometers. It’s incredible how the AFM works like the needle of a record player, not via optics, and sensing at the atomic level.

What's the size difference between the AFM needle and the area of stored magnetic flux on a hard drive platter? If you used an AFM as a sort of record player, scanning along lines of little pits, what sort of theoretical information density could be achieved over the whole surface of the disk?

This is an advertisement, but it's one of the few I actually enjoy watching, and it suggests a track is "2500 times smaller than a human hair" which puts an upper bound on the size of a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXs_9OXRnQo

This doesn't answer your question but your question made me think of this and I thought I'd share for anyone else.

If they are using the typical human hair = one thou, then the 2500 is suspiciously close to the conversion between inches and millimeters times a power of ten. I get 10 microns

That video is a perfect description. Hard disk drives are incredible machines, going through many steps to produce the platter. The flying head is also fascinating. To this day I have full working hard drives over over twenty years old, while my SSDs have gone kaput.

The Bay Area used to be the center of these companies’ manufacturing and I was there when they literally unbolted the Varian sputter machines from my company to ship to Malaysia. The likes of Seagate, Western Digital, Conner, Quantum, Maxtor, Micropolis, Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM, Read-Rite. Also Iomega in Utah. They were all here. They all left practically overnight. They were executive decisions. It was a shocking move and the whole history would make a good documentary or movie.

If you would like to work on a semiconductor fab tool that uses arrays of 100s of these MEMS-based AFMs for solving metrology and inspection challenges to boost yield, please reach out to me at [firstname]@icspicorp.com!

Applied Science is always worth an upvote

I had never seen his channel and immediately loved it! Awesome stuff!

Don't need to click the link to know who this will be.

"I'll spare you the total sample prep details"...

I've seen a genius' sperm

no, nuto

Honestly and hilariously, it’s a brilliant idea for his specific experiment. Met the exact specs of what he was looking for.

Great channel

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