We’ve got an interesting experiment almost ready to run. But what I’m finding the most fun about it (at the moment) isn’t so much the subject being studied. Rather it’s that we’re doing it in our own x-ray lab and without a visit to a synchrotron.

In truth, that’s not entirely fair. The question that we’re looking to answer has to do with something we saw during a beamrun at the Advanced Photon Source (or more precisely, something we didn’t see while we were looking for it). However, I think it is something we can resolve with the tools available in our own lab. Even if it’s an anomaly we cannot explain, we can at least investigate it a bit further.

So, what is fun about it? Well, it’s a full experiment complete with vacuum chamber mounted on a diffractometer, lots of diagnostic equipment and it’s all going to run with our “little” x-ray machine downstairs. The little x-ray machine is in fact not so little. It is still a 200 kiloWatt monster. In december a couple of my colleagues expended a great deal of effort to set things up and get it running.

We’re now almost at the point where we can begin doing the actual experiment. There are still a few bugs to be worked out. We’ve suffered the loss of 3 different computers within the space of a month (2 hard disk failures and 1 unknown). This has given us a bit of difficulty maintaining proper control over the instruments. We’ve also had a small problem keeping the diffractometer aligned properly, though that appears fixed for the moment.

Yesterday I began bringing the x-ray source online and checked it out. This morning it looks ready to go. I also checked most of our sample preparation and modification equipment and that seemed ok. The only thing left to bring online is a piece of equipment that measures various gas concentrations. Once that is done, it will be time to try to establish the conditions over the sample surface identical to those that we had in November. When we’ve achieved that, then we can measure some of the surface properties with the x-ray machine and see what they tell us.

Sigh... well, at least they fixed it. Rapidweaver, my old nemesis and blogging software package, suffered a severe setback in Nov-Dec. It would frequently crash, delete entries, and do various other nasty, terrible things. They released an update which I eventually managed to install and now things seem to be ok. We’ll see how long it lasts. In the meantime I hope to add the entries that were lost from Nov and Dec.

For now I’ll leave you with a link, not just a single article, but several from a guy at UCLA that has been generating x-rays using scotch tape. Move over MacGyver. I don’t think they will be replacing synchrotrons any time soon, but it’s a clever example of nature behaving in a way that A) nobody was really expecting and B) in hind-sight makes a great deal of sense.