• Question: What did you discover that only you knew about for a day?

    Asked by anon-175323 to David on 13 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: David Mills

      David Mills answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      I discovered solidification driven extrusion. What’s that I hear you ask?

      Well, if you take a piece of polished silicon and shoot it was a high power laser it makes a bunch of small cones.

      If you carry on, the tips of the cones melt and you get a very sharp spike form as the tip of the cone cools down and re-solidifies.

      There’s a picture of it here:

      I’d seen the same thing happen with Ice cube in the freezer (search for ice spikes if you want to know more and want an experiment you can try at home)

      For one day I was the only person that knew this happened with silicon, and I was the only person that knew why it happened. Then I told my PhD supervisor. We published a paper on it.

      You can read there paper here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/d1kuxnt2ukr0b4i/Nanotech172741.pdf?dl=0

      Let me know if you have any other questions on this.

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