first experiment photos

Yesterday I wrote about the effect of water saturation on the size of the crystals grown in my experiments. Today I've got photographs:



These are back-scatter electron images, which means that the brighter the pixel, the heavier elements present at that point (and the darker the pixel, the lighter the element). The bright ring-like objects are rims of iron-rich garnet growing on the seeds of Mg-garnet that was present in the powder before running the experiment. The bright dots of the same tone of brightness as the rings are new Fe-rich garnets growing in the matrix. As you can see, there is a pronounced difference in quantity and size between the two samples. Note the difference in the scale bars between the two photos.