FrFramed Scanning Electron Microscope picture of carbon nanotubes

approx. 23" x 17.5"

John Hart and Ryan Wartena

Submission to Material Research Society's Art as Science competition

at the Spring 2005 meeting in San Francisco, CA

Making Desertlands

The concept for this piece has been to create the whole thing.

What you see in front of you is the end result of a process

where a world was grown from carbon nanotubes,

its image was captured and then modified only by colorizing and blurring areas,

and finally presented in a handmade frame.

This image depicts structures of vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes

grown from patterns of metal catalyst on a silicon substrate.

The tallest structures shown are approximately 1 millimeter high,

and consist of individual nanotubes less than 20 nm in diameter.

The structures were grown in a C2H4/H2/Ar atmosphere at 750°C,

from a catalyst film of Fe/Al2O3.

The images were initially taken using a Philips XL30 FEG-ESEM,

and modified using Adobe Photoshop.