Thankfully things seem to have worked well enough through the day. We are taking at this very moment the data set that will tell us whether or not the experiment will ultimately be a success or whether we will be limited to merely having confirmation results of experiments by other scientists. It's going to be a nervous hour as we collect the data.

Pretty much regardless of what we see while we're taking the data, we've got another sample prepared and ready to go in. As soon as this one is done I will swap samples and begin taking the same data on a second sample. If we do see anything of interest, it needs to be seen at least twice on different samples. And truth be told, the effect may be subtle enough that we miss it with our quick "in situ" analysis at the beamline. And that's the other reason to repeat everything regardless of what we learn in the next hour. The effect could be quite small and subtle enough to require real effort to tease out correctly from the data. We just won't know until we've done it all. So... more data and more data.

While the scan is running there's not anything pressing left to do. So I'll turn my attention back to preparing my carbon-monoxide and gold presentation for the upcoming conference. That and I have some reading to get done. I recently got what I think will be a very fun book, "Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity" by Jim Sethna. I'm anxious to get into it a bit more than just my previous cursory glances. Sethna is a really sharp guy and I've always been entertained by his work.

I've also been vexed by a recent question concerning magnetic linear dichroism and my own scattering experiments. It's possible to argue, quite convincingly, from two different directions that it should or should not work for unmagnetized materials such as the films I studied in graduate school. I think I've finally figured out all the little steps to get to the answer (there's a couple of subtle points), but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. I did this several years ago and convinced myself of the correct answer, but merely saying "I figured it a while back (but don't quite remember at the moment)" isn't very satisfying conversation.

more soon. I hope....