Sigh...

It’s been a rather unfortunate day for my little experiment. We’ve encountered a problem without a real solution, at least in the short term.

In short, the beamline has been upgraded since the last time I tried this kind of experiment. In general terms this is a great thing. The beamline now produces more light and is focused to a smaller area. Unfortunately it’s too much light... or at least too much in too small of an area. If we could spread it out more (defocus the beam) over more of the sample area, then it might still work. But for now any part of my sample the beam hits becomes fried very quickly.

So... thankfully we have plenty of quality back-up experiments that can be done and we’ll shift over to them. But it means the one I wanted to do will need to be re-thought or get the “two suns in the sunset” solution. It’s too bad... We have been so close to having the data to finish this paper and now we find ourselves unable to do the experiment anymore. If it were simply a “problem” of having too much light it would be ok, but the central part of the problem is having all of that light (and hence radiation) deposited on such a small part of the sample surface.