Whilst our families (and Zhi Han) in Singapore were no doubt prepping for the long weekend of festivities ahead, we spent our morning traversing to Todai’s Shibuya Campus where we were hosted by Dr Takahashi and Dr Kawakatsu who introduced to us their works on tapping-mode AFM and color AFM respectively. While AFM is a relatively well established (read: old) technology, the novel works done by Dr Takahashi and Dr Kawakatsu are revitalizing and, quite literally, adding color to AFM. In Dr Takahashi’s work, his tapping AFM method allows for the quick probing of surfaces with good accuracy and resolution. Dr Kawakatsu’s color AFM method, on the other hand allows for the elucidation of the local surface properties by probing the Morse potential of the target. As per previous observations, their works likewise involve the development of very novel techniques and equipment, taking up extensive amounts of time (~10 years in Dr Kawakatsu’s case).
Post-lab visit, we made our way to Odaiba for Nano Tech conference again where we conducted our interview with LG and watched several seminars centred around graphene technologies. The interview with LG was highly informative, giving us insight into not only the inner workings of how a large company works, but as well the close inter-connectedness between government and large companies particularly in the case of Asian economies.
Perhaps the most standout-portion of today’s activities were the talks given in the special graphene symposium. Two participants, in particular, shone: Dr Khashar Ghaffarzadeh and Dr Alain Penicaud who spoke on the market trends for graphene and about “graphene water”. Content aside, their presentations were extremely concise, clear, to the point and highly audience-friendly. So good were their presentations that Nicole and I were fanboy/girling over graphene, much to the amusement of Dr Eda. Of course, ultimately, Dr Eda’s work is the best and there was no doubt that his work far surpassed anything that was presented at the conference (#CM3232TestOnWednesday).
We finally sent the year off at the hotel’s conference room armed to the teeth with laptops (for work T_T) and alcohol supervised by Dr Eda. (what a way to send the new year off).
PS: We were chased out of the room because the staff had to close the room.
Nanotechnology Study Tour - 2018 