A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions locates every pore in one field of a porous oxide film on aluminium and maps the patches of order in it against the metal grains beneath.
A square of anodised aluminium a fifth of a millimetre across is imaged whole, and its 4,251,318 pores are each given a position
The School of Underlying Conditions was founded to study what the surface rests on, and it has not confined itself to surfaces the size of a paddock. Its latest paper, Four Million Pores: A Complete Defect Census of One 200 µm Field of Self-Ordered Anodic Alumina, by Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Associate Professor and Lead, Basement Relations Group, and Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, takes the same question to a film of oxide grown on a piece of aluminium foil.
There is a point in any count at which one stops asking whether it will be worth finishing. We reached it early, and I can recommend the far side of it to colleagues in every school.
— Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Associate Professor and Lead, Basement Relations Group
The study mobilises imaging capability, positional discipline and a single specimen across the full extent of one field. Its authors located 4,251,318 pores, found 5.42% of them out of step with their neighbours, and traced the 3,412 patches of order in the film to the grains of the metal underneath. A smaller look at the same film, they report, could have returned almost any answer.
The University holds that completeness is a form of rigour open to any school prepared to stay at the instrument, and it is pleased to see the principle exercised at this scale. Dr Obiora said the work had left the School “rather better placed than it was to think about how much of anything is enough”.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.a5f7ux.