I took Spice to the Rasterelektronen-Mikroskop (REM) to get the deepest look into the Spice that is probably possible. TEM might even achieve more, but would be boring with crystals. So there you go, going into the Nanometers with our molecule. No specific question to be answered, so this is rather for the cosmetics.

What is Scanning Electron Microscopy?
Obviously as you know microscopy aimes at imaging the small world that exists between our limited perception through making visible which is smaller than maybe 500 µm, that is what I think the limit where most people stop distinguishing between details. Now I hope to not write any crap, so better read on wikipedia to be completely sure. But a fundamental about the physics of imaging matter is that in order to reconstruct an imagine you will need a (physical) particle that is a carrier of (visible) information and then manipulate this particle in a way that it can deliver structure information from your targeted sample to a electronic system, which will visualize the corresponding information as a picture on your PC. The pictures I normally take a taken with a light microscope, which is already pretty strong with a 1000x magnification. Still this imaging process is limited by the wavelength of the respective particle. More precisely a physical particle can only transmit information of a physical distance which is equal or higher than it's on wavelength. This is important as the wavelength of the particle will be the distinct feature that an electronic system (like a microscope) can analyze in order to gain structural informaion about the system. As our eyes are stuck to 400 - 700 nm wavelength light by million years of evolution (birds can go a little lower) we are limited to the (also) limited wavelength of light. A way to overcome this limit by science has been the invention of using electrons in order to deliver structural information.

The wavelength of electrons in an scanning electron microscope can be 0,1 nm which is 1.000 x times more than a light microscope can have. That is why this is currently giving the deepest look into any condensed matter that we could be possible be interested in. Now how does it work? Well maybe better get a second source for this (I'm not much into this stuff so no claim for truth of explanation) but carefully speaking an electron microscope is a vacuum chamber onto which a strong stream of electron is shot. These electrons will crash into the sample (here our DMT) and smash out more electrons from the sample (our DMT), then catched up by a detector. As this effect mostly occurs on the surface this technology will visualize the surface of any analyzed sample. Sounds pretty complex, but in other words this complicated process will reconstruct the surface of any measured sample, which will then result in an image that is pretty close to something that looks like a 3D geometry of the respective sample which we would see by eye. Therefore a SEM image will visualize the object just as if we could see it with a resolution of nanometers, not just micrometers (with light microscopy).

So after this short theoretical aspects, just another disclaimer: In order to make the reflected electrons visible in the most appreciatable way the sample has to be coated with gold. This is done in a plasma, that will deposit only very thin layers of gold. It's like your average golden Schnitzel that you would enjoy on a saturday afternoon, a very thin layer of gold on top. Pictures of this gangsta shit is attached at the end of this post. If this deposit is not optimal, it will create distrubances in the image. More a random side information, but it seems this process was not 100 % ideal and caused some aberrations at some of the pictures, so you will just know now

As the process is taken out in a really strong vacuum, the particles have to be fixed very strongly. This means any crystals have to be pressed with force onto the sample holder, crushing any big crystal structure. Luckily we anyways go for the smallest of the small, so destroying any 100s-micrometer crystals like here will not be any issue now ...


Pictures going from big to smaller and smaller and smaller ...



Looking big at the crystal world some parts are pretty chaotic. Not sure what is going on here, but you can see a lot of intersections of growing structures. Maybe some more impurities here, making more crystallites growing their way to eternity at the same time. This rather looks like an unorganized garden with a lot of things sticking inside of each other. Not much deeper look than what the link above is showing in terms of light-microscopy.




Still besides it is possible to get some more-ordered crystals, revealing quite some layers of small plates growing on top and into each other. Plates each are probably less than 1 µm thick. Here you can see some distrubances. This might be due to badelectron conductivity, but I normally thought this would more likely just result in too high brightness. In any way I have not much clue about electron microscopy, so let's say I will try to explain the visual defects with that thing




Again some ugly defects in that picture, I'm sorry but I am not I'm not familiar with this normally Still this is giving some nicer look into more shaped crystals with some cool geometry. Plates growing in quite a lot of different orientations. Check to the right the chaotic cluster of crystallites. The stuff which is now in the center is way more ordered and having a quite smooth surface, roughness must be in the nanometer-range! Now this is much more beautifull than the mess above, allthough maybe it has its own beauty.




This thing hit me hard, some gem placed inside some chaotic slate-formation. Check the area around this piece, it looks like nano fish scales all over the place. But what you can see in the middle is like some really smooth and clean piece of crystal, reminding me of some alien pine cone. Also the rock on the right end is quite esthetic. Let's dive into those deeper.



Some closer look at this thing. Looks cool.




That is the right micro crystal. See how small scales grow across its surface. Quite beautiful with some sharp transition. Now we can see some dust (or whatever?) placed across the crystal in the nanometer scale. Is it dust or maybe still DMT structures??




Now we move to the total left end of the crystal. Seeing a structure by nature demonstrating 90 ° angles is quite a cool thing. Quite a crazy appearance if you compare it to the chaotic background. Wondering how nature is growing these selective parts with some math-based beauty while other parts look like generated from a randomized algorithm. Or maybe there is a catch which is just hard to see




Crap this thing is heavily cut, but well some quick variation of scanning parameters did nothing. Just ignore it, this is now a pretty close view on the surface of a DMT crystal ... This is more than smooth, roughness must be at 10's of nanometers. Just some small mosaics are burnt into the DMT. Wonder what that is, it's giving such smooth crystals but then at it's own skin having these repeating patterns. The bigger particles on top of the surface at 500 nm - 1 µm might just be dust!




This structure is just hillarious, not sure what to say. It has 90 ° angles combined with a triplett of round bounces. Check again the craters inside of the surface. That stuff we have seen from much more afar in the first pictures. Some scars inside of the DMT. How does that whole geometry fit into anything above




This as the deepest expedition into our molecule. Not very sharp picture, but obviously there is a limit with any technology. In the middle we can see some "defect" on the surface, surrounded by those pattern-like craters on top of a DMT crystallite. No idea what these black marks are, seems like some craters of 10-20 nanometers deep.

Take into consideration that 1 DMT molecule is roughly 0,7 nanometer in length, meaning that if you check the scale bar of that picture it is technically just a line of less than 150 DMT molecules sticked together in length ...







Now as a funny bonus I got yer dat OG gilden DMT which I had to create via Gold Sputtering in order to do this measurement. While the SEM pictures are quite a success I am sad how this thing "macroscopically" AKA with light microscope AKA in the micrometer range looks pretty ugly, but damn boy who cares if it's golden bree crank dat stuff on yer chain. Maybe the plasma striked hard on this sample while sputtering, partially melting the biggest structures. But well what is precious will most likely melt away fast if you dont pay attention, that is a constant throughout life.

Cool photos. Alien through and through.

This is awesome. I've attempted a similar thing in the past with my cheap microscope. These pictures are far better than anything I have produced so far, obviously. What a cool thing you have done for us.

Thank you for this post

Electron Microscopy is similar in practice to MS. Strong vac creates a mean free path for electrons, so as to not react with ambient oxygen which would result in greater aberrations. Curious as to whether these images elucidate any indication of polymorphism, of course an x-ray diffractor would be the tool for that.

I talked with a guy who told me it could be a bad conductivity of the crystal, which would give these aberrations - but I thought it would only make stuff too bright (because electrons over-accumulate)? Now this has some vibe like vapor-wave art

Because of the vacuum I was scared the DMT could fly off (which would probably be even worse than already a "normal sample" so I pressed it quite hard and was scared that it has destroyed all the details. Maybe it lost some structures at the meso-scale, but luckily not the smallest. Was thinking how to instead precipitate DMT directly onto a sample holder, but could not think of any reasonable way

Indeed this polymorphism is quite a mystery since long time, it must be one reason why products continuously vary so much in colour or shape, but yet all samples analyzed did not give any hints about possible oligomer structures etc. ... There is a XRD where I could actually do the measurements, but this I never did all the years, because I cannot do it myself