I am wondering what that ghost thick outline, which is around the carbon wire image which I have attached. I did prepare my sample in a different method (sonication-dispersion in Acetone- and drop-casting on a carbon-coated Cu grid) to check if this artifact disappears, could still see this shadow-like image around all the carbon wire/fibers. Did an EDX on the outer shadow part, just shows up as C (majority ) and Cu. Just curious to know what the community thinks, please let me know. I am cent percent sure that the diameter of carbon wires is abt 50-60nm from the SEM micrographs. So, what is that ghost image which is like 30nm on each side of the wire??? :)
in my opinion it is a charge barrier developed during curing due to surface energy differences between two materials
I do not see any ghost images. All is real. Why did you get your specimen like that, it's a different question.
A thin white outline is due the fact that image is slightly out of focus. Some people try to get rid of it by better focusing, some people like to have it for better contrast.
Dear Deepak Sridhar , like Vladimir Dusevich, I don´t see any ghost images there. The "ghost thick outline, which is around the carbon wire" is something real, something material. It looks like some kind of shell or coat around your carbon wire. It is light grey because it is more electron transparent (less dense) than the carborn wire core. It could be some kind of organic matter, may be part of the precursor you used for synthesizing your carbon wires, may be some contamination. The material nature of this coat is clear, look at the left top corner for example, there the coat is thinner and even it looks like dissapeared in a small section of the carbon fiber. In other parts this coat is thicker, and where the fibers overlap, you can see the coats of top and bottom fibers.
The white outline is what Vladimir explained and apparently you have a whitish core in your fibers, so may be instead of solid fibers, you could have some kind of hollow fibers with a thick carbon wall and a tiny hole, or a less dense core.
Hope it helps.
As others have said already, this is not a ghost image but something real that is present on the CNTs.
- To me it looks like a contamination layer, it could have been there from the beginning or it is induced by the electron beam that cracks the surrounding gas in an electron-beam induced deposition (EBID) process. With an LN2 cooling trap this type of contamination can usually be avoided.
Dear Deepak
You are looking at an overlab shadow of two similar TEM images of the wire,i.e., transmitted waves, with a slight phase shift between the the two images of the wire. This is the reason the over all image was not in focus. So, to get a focus image, you need to get rid off the phase shift between the the two images of the wire.
I see a lot of cheaters from Tashkent, recommending meaningless post by Bekzod Bekchanov . Why are you doing it?
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