Today was my first day at internship, and I was surprised at how much work there is already and how fast time went. I'm working with an undergraduate student on a project concerning the deposition of a hydrogel over a prime layer (consisting of particular bilayers) on top of a silicon wafer, and specifically, I'll be studying the growth regime of one such system. Since today was my first day, I was led through some practice of creating these depositions for the system I'm working with and running measurements on them.
I started with the very beginning of the process - cleaning the wafers - and then ran through all the steps needed to coat them with the various polymers. Along the way, I remade a solution of phosphate buffer and stabilized the pH of various stock solutions; since the film on the wafer responds to pH, it's important that the levels are exactly where they should be.
After I deposited the prime layer on the wafers, I was taught to use the ellipsometer to measure the resulting thickness. At first, I was utterly confused as to how to operate the machine, but going through the steps the approximately one million times needed to do all the measurements, I was basically doing it without even having to think about it. This piece of equipment is very old and fickle, so it only worked when it felt like it, leaving many of us in the lab disgruntled.
Then I soaked the wafers in a certain acid and brought them over again to determine the new thicknesses. During the down time in this process, I worked on a set of wafers under a variation of my system and removed a particular polymer from their prime layers by exposing them to a higher pH. These also had to be measured in the ellipsometer.
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