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David Mills discovered this pocked landscape upon taking a close look at the surface of a silicon sample with a scanning electron microscope. As part of a project examining laser ablation of silicon, Mills, a facilities manager at Queen Mary University of London, placed the material under an ultraviolet laser pulse. The laser was strong enough to vaporize some of the atoms on the silicon’s surface. While the silicon atoms floated around as vapor, they reacted with gaseous hydrogen chloride that Mills had added to the experiment. The acidic HCl molecules reacted with the silicon vapor, and then the reaction products settled back down on the surface, creating this rough pattern. As a result, the silicon got very black because the textured surface absorbs more light than the original smooth crystalline surface.
Submitted by David Mills
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