Where’s Snoopy?

Mazhar Ali (graduate student), Leslie Schoop (graduate student), Rebecca Smaha (undergraduate ’14), Quinn Gibson (graduate student), Zach Detweiler (graduate student)

Chemistry

When found in nature, sodium iridium oxide crystals form honeycomb-like plates. But the crystals we see here have rounded edges and holes. We’re not sure why. It may be that fast-track growth in the lab (where it takes days rather than millennia for a crystal to form) allows the individual hexagonal cells to stack with a slight rotational offset, resulting in these curious shapes. If you were to visit our lab this is exactly what you would see looking through a Scanning Electron Microscope. Can you find Snoopy?