DECEMBER 1997 REPORT FOR

W. CHARLES SYMONS, III

As mentioned in last month's report, the main concern of November was attending and presenting the invited paper entitled NIR NEAR-FIELD MICROSCOPY at the Eastern Analytical Symposium (EAS). To this end, the first portion of the month was spent preparing slides and practicing the talk. This preparation paid off since the presentation went very smoothly and prompted a great deal of interest from the audience.

After returning from EAS, the laser dermatome project became the primary focus, due to the change of the first testing date to January 7, 1998. For this project, the wiring of the electronic control circuitry to the PC parallel interface as well as the dermatome motors was completed. With the completion of the wiring, a very rough code was written which demonstrated the computer controlling the movements of each of the dermatome's three motors. Figures 1 and 2 below show a dermatome motor control board as well as the wired dermatome itself.

Finally, in anticipation of the upcoming Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscope (NSOM) X-band experiment, the Moment Method NSOM code was partially reworked. This code reworking was done to provide faster run times as well as to provide a better convergence rate for the current along the sample wire. Results of this code are pending the testing of this code which is currently underway.

Figure1: Dermatome Motor Control Board.

Figure 2: Dermatome Instrument.