About

Why is this site called Affable Lurking?

Well there are several reasons…

First off, several personal sites in the alf.fan.pratchett fandom take the form affordable-X where X depends on the site owner. I didn’t want to follow this convention for my new site (not really being an AFPer as such) so I went with Affable.

The Lurking in affable-lurking comes from something I’m pretty terrible at. Namely lurking (reading but not posting) on various usenet newsgroups.

It works because I’m a pretty affable chap anyway.

Who am I?

I’m Dave.
I’m depressingly close to 30.
I lurk.

What I do: My Research 

For the last few years I’ve been investigating the action of pulsed excimer laser light on silicon and titanium surfaces in the presence of various plasma etch process gases.  The aim being to understand and direct the processes that lead to the formation of Laser Induced Periodic Surface Structures (LIPSS), holes and areas covered by mesoscopic conical pillars (black-Si).

Techniques have been developed to allow a large degree of control over the positioning of holes and pillars formed by the laser-surface interation and post-processing has been used to drastically alter the morphology of the material, producing silicon structures with aspect ratios 10^4 and both ordered and disorded macroporous silicon.
More recently I’ve also been investigating the process of Solidification Driven Extrusion (SDE) – a process we discovered that scales from  macroscale objects (Ice spikes) to the nanoscale with ultra-sharp silicon spikes protruding from the apex of silicon pillars.}