Limiting Artifacts

Grinding should be done with gentle pressure on the mount and should never be done dry. Each grit should be used only until the scratches from the previous grit are removed. 

Defect/cause of defect Effect on the specimen Suggestions for prevention 

Damage to ground surface due to localized melting Surface exhibits a matte, rough appearance without grinding marks Use more coolant, use a metal disk substrate and/or apply less pressure 

Grains of grinding abrasive embedded in the surface Block shaped inclusions visible Improve rinsing with more coolant, less applied pressure, better quality abrasive paper, rinse and clean ultrasonically 

Grains of polishing abrasive embedded in the surface Small inclusions visible under the microscope Generally due to softening of the specimen surface. Ensure good cooling, low applied pressure, final polish only with water. Do not clean ultrasonically. 

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Factors known to limit artifacts in etched polymers are ... 

A standard is a document, definition, or reference artifact intended for general use by as large a body as possible a specification, which involves similar technical content and similar format, usually is limited in both its intended appHcabiUty and its users. 

Other artifacts that have been mentioned arise from the sensitivity of STM to local electronic structure, and the sensitivity of SFM to the rigidity of the sample s surface. Regions of variable conductivity will be convolved with topographic features in STM, and soft surfaces can deform under the pressure of the SFM tip. The latter can be addressed by operating SFM in the attractive mode, at some sacrifice in the lateral resolution. A limitation of both techniques is their inability to distinguish among atomic species, except in a limited number of circumstances with STM microscopy. 

For thin-film samples, abrupt changes in refractive indices at interfrees give rise to several complicated multiple reflection effects. Baselines become distorted into complex, sinusoidal, fringing patterns, and the intensities of absorption bands can be distorted by multiple reflections of the probe beam. These artifacts are difficult to model realistically and at present are probably the greatest limiters for quantitative work in thin films. Note, however, that these interferences are functions of the complex refractive index, thickness, and morphology of the layers. Thus, properly analyzed, useful information beyond that of chemical bonding potentially may be extracted from the FTIR speara. 

The curvature may be an artifact of a selection of nucleophiles of mixed structural types chosen to display a wide range in pAo. Buncel et al. ° varied pK by changing the solvent composition over a limited range rather than by changing the structure. They studied the reaction between X-C6H4-CT and p-nitrophenyl acetate in 40-90 mol% dimethylsulfoxide—water mixtures with just three X substituents... 

The Production Department was not amused, because lower values had been expected. Quality Control was blamed for using an insensitive, unse-lective, and imprecise test, and thereby unnecessarily frightening top management. This outcome had been anticipated, and a better method, namely polarography, was already being set up. The same samples were run, this time in duplicate, with much the same results. A relative confidence interval of 25% was assumed. Because of increased specificity, there were now less doubts as to the amounts of this particular heavy metal that were actually present. To rule out artifacts, the four samples were sent to outside laboratories to do repeat tests with different methods X-ray fluorescence (XRFi °) and inductively coupled plasma spectrometry (ICP). The confidence limits were determined to be 10% resp. 3%. Figure 4.23 summarizes the results. Because each method has its own specificity pattern, and is subject to intrinsic artifacts, a direct statistical comparison cannot be performed without first correcting the apparent concentrations in order to obtain presumably true... 

A particular problem with GRAFA and RBL is the reproducibility of the retention data. The retention time axes should be perfectly synchronized. Small shifts of one time interval (thus the ith spectrum in X, corresponds with the i+lth spectrum in X ) already introduce major errors (> 5%) when the chromatographic resolution is less than 0.6. The results of an extensive study on the influence of these factors on the accuracy of the results obtained by GRAFA and RBL have been reported in Ref. [37]. Although some practical applications have been reported [38,39], the lack of robustness of RBL and GRAFA due to artifacts mentioned above has limited their widespread application in chromatography. 

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