Thus far today we're actually doing a little bit of science. Or at least we're trying to do science. There's no assurance that what we want to do will actually work, however at least we're not struggling just to get the beamline functional. It's really sad that we had to spend 50% of our beamtime just getting the light in the proper place.

What we're doing at the moment is watching how water behaves on metal-oxide surface as we freeze and thaw the water. We're seeing some interesting crystalization of the water molecules which we believe is actually occurring on the surface. We will spend much of the rest of this shift ensuring that what we're seeing really is on the surface of the metal-oxide and not elsewhere. But thus far it's repeatable and seems to be in interesting places.

We have also, thankfully, reached the stage of data collection. It means that we can pause and catch our breath while the experiment is running. Or, in this case, it should allow me enough time to walk around the storage ring for some welcome exercise. Hopefully I'll also finish the next blog entry.