Today was quite a day and follows on the heels of "quite a day."

This was my first chance to host a visit for a guest scientist, in this case Paul G. Evans from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I recently joined the colloquium committee for the Materials Science Division. The committee selects and invites speakers to give our weekly colloquium (no self nominations!). I met Paul a couple of months ago at a workshop and wanted to learn more about his work (something I'm a bit unfamiliar with). One of the best ways to do that is have someone come out to give a talk! I enjoyed putting this together and, so long as I'm not in charge of it every week, it's something I'll probably continue to enjoy in the future.

It's been a rather long day because we're also currently running our experiments. Two of mine are actively running in the Materials Science building, while one of the other post-docs has an experiment running at the Advanced Photon Source. Being in so many places at once is difficult. It's not easy to violate causality.

This all comes after the day before which gave me one of the best experimental results we've gotten thus far. It was one of those rare days where everything worked (including the experimenter!). We went to look for something we'd seen indirectly with our other experiments and found it. Having an independent confirmation (in this case, a radically different experimental technique) of a result is very, very reassuring. In particular it's coming at a good time as we're ready to submit a paper on the first set of experiments. Now that we're in "phase 2" and the results are confirmed it goes quite a ways to setting my mind at ease. If you're going to make a rather interesting, potentially controversial claim, then it really helps to have several different pieces of evidence. ie...the bigger the claim, then the better the evidence.

The experiment we're running at the APS is on "free" beamtime. There is a new device (x-ray source) that needs to be tested. The scientists in charge have it set up, and nominally working. However, the real test for them is if people can come in and do science with it. We're that group of people (we hope).

The reality is of course that nothing is free. As the x-ray source is new, it has some issues and problems that must be solved before we have a hope of doing good science. And part of our effort will be spent helping the beamline scientists solve these problems. Ideally everything will work rather quickly and we'll get to take some nice data. But for now there are no promises. We've got some oddities in the photons coming down the pipe and we're not quite sure what to make of it. Conversely, at the moment these oddities don't really have an adverse effect on our measurements. However, it's something that needs to be worked out.