# School of the ground counts every pore in one field of oxide film

> 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.

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.